Some years ago, the Garden Tour poster featured an old garden gate, with hydrangeas and crocosmia, summer dried grass on the lawn, and a beautiful sunlit day. I commented at the time that it was funny, because in reality it was the antithesis of the purpose of the Garden Tour - it represents the unattended, left and forgotten garden, where no one has lifted a finger in years. It's charming, in its own way, and it was a beautiful watercolor - but...
Hydrangeas weren't high on my list, even as Martha Stewart brought them into vogue. Our neighborhood sports huge bushes covered in deep blue-purple mopheads, like those in the picture but prettier. The biggest problem they have is that people were coming and cutting all the blooms off, sometimes with permission to take a couple, and other times without asking. Not sure where they were selling them, but apparently there was quite a market.
I've started some successfully from cuttings, and I planted a beautiful white florist's hydrangea that came as a gift. It was small, and planted in the back of the property alongside the now-huge cherry tree, and as we're clearing, I find a full-size hydrangea loving the shade and sporting the biggest, and purest white blooms imaginable.
Couple that with my fascination with the Shooting Star hydrangea, and I find myself liking them, and as I am redoing everything, I find myself planning them into the design. At the same time I find it ironic that I've been reduced to that, or come back to the fold, maybe.
Why? The indestructibility. The proven performance, the sheer drama, and graphic appeal of the big flowers. And, yeah, not having to have to worry about it factors in.
So - this article by Carol Klein in the Guardian was interesting, along those same lines.
◼ Hydrangeas are the butt of many a garden joke. Perhaps it is a question of familiarity breeding contempt. While nobody can deny their omnipresence, they are popular for good reason: easy to grow, floriferous and dependable.
She says: Those in the know grow the superb white mop-head H. macrophylla 'Soeur Therese', which does best in partial shade. H. paniculata does what it says, producing large terminal panicles, cone-shaped collections of tiny, fertile flowers and very visible sterile florets. White cultivars such as H. paniculata 'Unique', with weighty heads of pure white flower, are exquisite. Quirky but lovely, the flowers of H. paniculata 'Green Spire' always stay on the green side of white. On a similar scale, H. quercifolia has similar though less ostentatious flowers, with the bonus of rich autumn colour, and H. arborescens 'Annabelle' smothers itself with pompoms of pure white. Peerless.
◼ And now there's Incrediball, "the flowers really are more than a foot long... A new selection of a native species, this is without a doubt the largest-flowered mophead type in the world, its blooms approaching the size of beachballs!
Incrediball® arose, like so many great inventions, as an accident -- it was part of a breeding program designed to improve the stem strength of Hydrangea, so that the blooms would stand up rather than flopping. Well, it worked -- but who could have imagined the blooms would emerge so enormous and so packed with florets? It is descended from Hydrangea 'Annabelle', a beloved favorite for decades, but each of Incrediball's® flowerheads contains 4 TIMES THE NUMBER OF BLOOMS as 'Annabelle's. It's simply amazing."
I still like my Zebra Hydrangea better, the petals themselves are larger, and it's much more substantial looking, at least so far, than the Incrediballs at the nursery. But, I'm tempted.
And then, there's the wedding bouquets this past week - it's enough to win you over forever:
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