Hydrangea Care

I have a lot of hydrangeas in my yard, all but one of them coming from a single bush.  (The odd-bush out is, of course, the white one which grows in a big pot and doesn't seem to mind.)  I don't provide them with any special care and I'm a confused pruner when it comes to hydrangeas, so they tend toward odd shapes but always to abundant blooms. They're a plant I really have respect for.

Fortunately, and especially in August, hydrangeas are very easy to root from green cuttings, so next year I hope to have even more of them.  Point Roberts ought to be advertised as the Hydrangea Capital of the World, I think (like Petaluma being the Chicken Capital of the World, and Castroville being the Artichoke Capital of the World).  I've never seen such abundant hydrangeas.  Because the soil is so acidic here, they tend toward the blue kind, but some approach a gorgeous purple and there are occasional pink ones to be seen.  And obviously people could manipulate that more if they were so inclined to if they changed the soil acidity.  For information about changing color, try this site.

It does seem to me (in my ceaseless search for a nonexistent economic development plan for Point Roberts) that if there is any economic development to be found here, it will be in hydrangeas.  We have a lot of them, they are of superb quality, they don't exist grow easily or at all everywhere in the U.S.  They don't, however, always come with chartreuse frogs. The down side is that there aren't a lot of uses for them other than as flowers, live and dried.  What we need is research to discover that hydrangeas could be the source of an amazing medicinal product.  Then, we're talking full home-business development.

Now, the down side even of live flower hydrangea use is that, if you cut them and put them in water, they are very likely to be wilted within a few hours.  This, I am told, is because the plant puts out a sap to prevent water loss.  Thus, when you cut their stems, the sap immediately seals the stem and it can't get to the water you have obligingly put in its vase.  The answer to this is boiling water.  It seems like plant cruelty, but it works beautifully.  Cut the hydrangea stalk (in the green area, not the hardened brown/grey section) and put it in tap water.  Then put it in water you've just brought to a boil and let it sit in the hot water for about half an hour.  Then put it back in the tap/cool water/vase.  If, after 3 or 4 days it begins to wilt, you can repeat this (recut the stem) and it will likely liven back up.  However, you can't do it indefinitely.  So few solutions to anything work forever, of course.  Hydrangeas do not make us feel blue, but they certainly tell us what blue looks like
 Update:  For information on rooting hydrangeas.

Dry Days

After four weeks of no rain, we had about ten minutes worth this morning around 6 a.m. I heard it and didn’t realize, at first, what it was. But it didn’t matter that it was rain because it didn’t rain either long enough or hard enough to offer much to any plant in need. Usually, we can rely on at least one day of rain any time we are away from either garden for two weeks, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect when we got back to the Canadian garden.

When we left, the dozen or so peony bushes were just starting to bloom. When we returned, they were mostly still in bloom, with a few buds just barely opening. It turns out that not having been rained on was a favor because, although I had tied them up, that’s usually not enough to keep them from breaking off if they get a lot of water from above. But here I was without a single broken down peony bloom. All the other expected bloomers were coming along fine, although the blueberry bushes looked a little puny in their berryness. But it was pleasing to see that they can take care of themselves more than I might think (this may be like children?).

On the other hand, the deer apparently didn’t have enough water around to please them so they ate all the leaves (but none of the flowerette buds—too dry?) from the hydrangea bushes in the front yard, but entirely left alone the larger hydrangeas in the driveway which they walk by on their normal pathway after they leave the front yard. I’ve never had them eat hydrangeas before now, but I never had them eat English ivy before this winter (although they could eat that stuff day and night and not get a peep out of me). In any case, it is the flowers that I find most appealing in the hydrangea, so perhaps this is simply an example of the deer finding a way to live cooperatively with me.

Poking around on the net, I found an interesting list of plants that deer may not eat, or may not eat too often, or too much of, or too thoroughly, and various other categories. The author warns, however, that ‘deer don’t read lists.’ She does advise that they occasionally eat hydrangeas and often eat English ivy. (The photo is last year's hydrangea with the recommended leaves AND flowers. We'll see what it looks like this year with flowers but no leaves.)

Those Falling Leaves

‘The falling leaves drift by my window...’ Don’t they just? September is here, the mornings are already cold, and the vine maples have been turning red in the woods for almost a month. ‘Autumn Leaves,’ this most romantic of American songs, however, turns out to be this most romantic of French songs. Words originally written by Jacques Prevert, lyrics by Joseph Kosma (both French), with the English lyrics to the credit of Johnny Mercer. The French lyrics don’t seem to be about autumn, so at least it is the most romantic of American lyrics about the seasons. In any case, when those falling leaves drift by my window, I don’t much think about the sun-burned summer I am leaving or how much I miss you, whoever you happen to be. That is because I am the steward (or the co-steward) of five or six big-leaf maple trees. Also sometimes called ‘dinner-plate maples because the leaves are the size of dinner plates. And they really are. So, if you are the custodian of five or six big leaf maples, you are the owner of bales of autumn leaves. And there is no romance in trying to figure out what to do with them.

This morning, I got up and swept several hundred of them off the deck--remember the phrase 'the size of dinner plates'; by noon, several hundred more had taken their place and we haven’t even begun to deal with the bulk of them; 90% are still on the trees. I raked today’s allotment up just now and stuffed two big garbage bags tightly: today’s autumn leaves. I store them back by the compost, but we are now collecting this year’s leaves and I haven’t yet finished with composting last year’s leaves. This is because there are just too many leaves. Several of the trees are in the woods and those leaves I don’t touch. It is only those on the deck, in the cleared areas around the house, in the near garden beds where autumn’s leaves will not protect the flowers over the winter but will protect the slugs who will then eat the flowers in the spring as they come up, right before I rake the leaves out of the bed. Thus, they have to be raked in the fall.

There is this strange abundance at this time of year. It’s not only the apples and plums, but also maple leaves. And you can add to that hydrangea flowers and dried lunaria pods. Point Roberts seems to be the perfect environment for both of them. The hydrangeas come in all colors and I can change their color by fooling with the soil chemistry or just by planting them somewhere else in the yard. All of the dozen or so hydrangeas in my yard are offspring of one hydrangea; new ones are made by sticking a cut stalk in the ground in August. That’s it.

Lunaria (often called ‘silver dollar plants’) put out these gorgeous seed pods in the fall after providing excellent purple flowers with dark green leaves in the early spring, flowers that provide a wonderful contrast to tulips and daffodils. Each circular, silver pod carries 3 or 4 seeds with twenty to a hundred pods on each stalk. My experience suggests that every single seed will grow into yet another lunaria plant, anxious to provide in alternate years more enormous stalks of silver dollar seed pods and seeds.

People are always talking about developing the economic base of Point Roberts, but the only thing they seem to be able to come up with to achieve this reasonable goal is to build more houses. My suggestion is that we take some of Point Roberts’ absolutely most abundant resources and figure out how to develop them economically instead: apples, plums, dried maple leaves, hydrangea blossoms, and lunaria pods. There may be a few other things like this (starfish? sand dollars?), but we could just start with the obvious ones and work out from there.