Mophead Hydrangeas (1 of 3)

From “Hydrangea” in Ornamental Shrubs by Jaroslav Hofman:

“The name of this plant originated from the Greek words ‘hydor’ meaning water and ‘angeion’ meaning vessel, with reference to the fact that the shrub requires adequate water for successful growth. It is known as the Hortensia, the name having been conferred by the discoverer of the shrub in China in 1767, namely the French physician and botanist Filibert Commerson. The Hydrangea was brought to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the first time by Sir Joseph Banks in 1789….

“The Hydrangea has been cultivated since ancient times in China and Japan. The first shrub of this species to be brought to Great Britain was apparently also a cultivated and not a wild type. Its flowers were red, its umbels composed mainly of sterile flowers. The new shrub aroused great interest at that time with its outstanding beauty. Through cultivation and cross-breeding new forms were produced, but at first the growers were unable to attain much diversity of colour, dull, pinkish-red or pale pink predominating….

“Indeed the Hydrangea resisted all attempts to improve it for a long time. It was only after the importing of a glowing-red variety from Japan (the ‘Rosea’ variety) and its cross-breeding with ‘Otaksa’ [that] French horticulturists… succeeded from 1910 onwards in breeding a large number of new forms differing not only in colour, but also in shape, which surprised visitors to the horticultural exhibition taking place in Paris at the time. Further progress was achieved when it was discovered that the Hydrangea reacted strongly to certain chemicals in the soil by a sudden change of colour in its flowers. For example, it was found that iron or ammonia in the soil fostered the growth of blue flower-heads, formerly a very rare phenomenon in this flower.”

From “Hydrangea” in Tremulous Hinge: Poems by Adam Giannelli:

Water vessel — patina of summer —
its zeppelins soar all the way
into September, the heads colored
like the flavored ice atop snow cones….

Beside a driveway and a house,
a few orbs, flamingo-like, float
on thin stalks. Others, laden
with bloom, rest, like tails of tired poodles, on the ground.

Each mophead is a bevy, a beveled blue,
a standing ovation,
that fumes with lattices of spume, solid but fretful, like sleep.
I never knew that ecstasy
could arrive at
so many angles….

Hello!

When I moved into my house in 2004, there were two batches of hydrangeas in the back yard, one on each side of the steps leading to the courtyard. All of them produced flowers in the “mophead” shape, a descriptor used to differentiate them from hydrangea flowers of the “lacecap” style, like the Bluebird Hydrangeas I added to the garden myself. “Mophead hydrangea” is also a common stand-in name for hydrangea varieties that produce flowers like this.

The came-with-the-house hydrangeas were a mix of several varieties (probably Hydrangea paniculata, Hydrangea arborescens, and Hydrangea macrophylla) but since I wasn’t sure of their identities, I got into the habit of calling them all “hydrangibles” — a word I made up that combines “hydrangea” and “dirigible” in honor of their large, floppy blooms that seem to float above the leaves. Imagine my surprise to find the poem I excerpted above, where the poet describes hydrangeas as “zeppelins” — since zeppelins are a kind of dirigible and the poem evokes the same “floating above the garden” imagery I was going for with “hydrangible.”

About half of the hydrangibles got frozen out a couple of years ago, during two weeks of plant-destroying deep-freezes we had around the winter holidays. When spring came, those that didn’t die behaved very badly, producing only a handful of new stems pointing in all sorts of odd directions (as hydrangeas often do), and developing only a few anemic flowers. This year, though, they did quite a bit better — so I got them to pose for a couple of photo-shoots and their flowers were big and floppy enough that I could refer to them as hydrangibles once again.

While working on the photographs, I wondered if I could pretend there was a real-life people-moving vessel that might be called a “hydrangible” — since, you know, it’s quite common that our plant names (even imaginary ones) are based on something else. So I went to Adobe Firefly (which I wrote about here and here, and haven’t used since) and asked it to generate “a photograph of a dirigible that’s covered with hydrangea flowers, flying over the city of Atlanta” — and it produced for me these five images…

… which obviously prove that hydrangibles capable of flying people around in the clouds actually do exist, because, hey, the internet “knows” about them. Now I just need to figure out where these hydrangibles take off from so I can go for a ride, and would especially like to fly over (and hang out at) the fanciful lake and park in the last image, as I didn’t even know about that lovely body of water and greenspace smack-dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta.

🙂

Thanks for reading and taking a look!