Favorite Plants

I have a friend who doesn't think much of hydrangeas, any hydrangeas.  She thinks they're too big and messy for most suburbans landscapes.  When she talks about hydrangeas, I see organized, well groomed, sleek yards explode into craziness with the introduction of a Limelight hydrangea hedge or Pee Gee tree hydrangea as a focal point.  She frowns slightly.  Her nose wrinkles as though a waft of bad smell has passed by.  She seldom recommends hydrangeas to anyone.

But I love hydrangeas, almost all hydrangeas.  I sell them all the time, to people with city gardens, or farmsteads, above all, to people with suburban landscapes.

I don't know why my friend dislikes hydrangeas so much but I know why I love them: they were part of Grandma's garden at Lake Shady.  Along with irises, roses, peonies and hostas, hydrangeas are archetypal plants for me.  I remember pulling apart a big, white mophead, realizing that each little piece was a flower, creating the entire bloom.  I remember watching big, slow bumblebees floating around the blooming heads, then lighting to dance on a flower, only to take off, slower and heavier.  I remember thinking as a child how lovely the hydrangeas were rising above beds of hostas in the dappled light under a vast American linden tree.

When I got gardens of my own, I put hydrangeas into them, learning to treat the shrubs like perennials, cutting them to the ground every fall to keep them from looking over-grown and messy.  I gave them top dressings of compost every fall after cutting them back and again in the spring when they leafed out.  I made sure they had adequate water during dry spells and great heat.

Originally, there were only white-flowering hydrangeas hardy in Minnesota and those are the ones I love the most.  In the last decade, many more Northern hardy varieties have become available, and while I think Annabelle is still the best seller, Endless Summer, the blue- or pink-blooming hydrangea, now gives the whites a run for their money.  I am particularly fond of Pee Gee, with its huge conical heads that go from green to white to pinkish to bronze.  Pee Gee is often pruned to make a tree, but I love the shrub form that grows to six or seven feet high, and just as wide.

Give Endless Summer soil sulfur in spring and early August to achieve the blue blooms in Minnesota, give all hydrangeas ample water, provide well-draining, rich soil, and prune, prune, prune.  Hydrangeas will work in all landscape plans, lightening shaded corners and bringing a rare blue to late summer gardens.  While many hydrangeas are large shrubs and none are small shrubs, everyone should have one, at least.  Even lazy gardeners can have success with hydrangeas.