In Praise of Blue Hydrangeas

I have never been a gardener, resisting the easy equation of flowers and femaleness, and making it a matter of feminist pride never to learn about the myriad varieties of roses or the uses of baby’s breath or anything about the conditions under which climbing arbutuses climb. Thus, I could distinguish myself from generations of women who made gardens, and only gardens, their life’s work. Women like my grandmother, who belonged for decades to her local garden club and knew her pansies from her phlox, her rhododendrons from her hydrangeas but could not tell a Rainier Maria Rilke from a Jean-Paul Sartre. I was meant for higher things, or so I thought in my arrogant youth. It probably didn’t help that one of my father’s favorite jokes, which came up every spring faithful as a perennial, was the old saw about horticulture.

But in the silver-blue dark of middle life, I spy with my far-sighted eye many new things, including the splendor of blue hydrangeas. All blue flowers are lovely to look at—cornflowers, delphiniums, forget-me-nots, bachelor buttons, gentians--even though I often need help in identifying one from the other--but there is something about the lush, puffy extravagance of hydrangeas that never fails to stop me from whatever task I am hurrying to finish, and praise the goddess of all flowering things. I am told by my gardener friends—and, oddly enough, I have quite a few, a virtual bridal bouquet of smart, accomplished women with advanced degrees who are clearly not air-heads—that blue hydrangeas, unlike their pink or white sisters, require a high level of acidity in the soil, or they will not flower into that glorious deep blue. I’m also told that blue hydrangeas grow best in mild climates, which is why one sees them so much on Cape Cod and along Long Island Sound.

My father’s mother has been dead for over twenty-five years, but sometimes I wish I could bring her back on an Indian summer afternoon like today, when a few lone hydrangeas are still in bloom but beginning their slow fade back to green, and ask her, “Did you have hydrangeas in your garden? And did you love them as much as I do?” Of course, she would scold me for being so dim-witted that I didn’t pay more attention as a child, didn’t notice them on all those summer afternoons when my sister and I were visiting, and we called through her big house, and she screamed, “Youhoo, I’m in the garden,” and we raced outside to the back porch, and onto the stone veranda and down the walk, edged on one side with boxwood hedges, and there she’d be, a grey-haired figure with sun-blotched cheeks, dressed in baggy Bermuda shorts and faded shirt, a sweat-stained khaki hat pulled low over her forehead to keep out the sun, crouched down over her sweet Williams.

“Of course I had hydrangeas,” she tells me, slowly uncoiling her arthritic limbs and wiping her dirt-encrusted fingers upon the coat tails of her shirt, her voice brisk and confident. “I had white ones and pink ones. I had blue ones in front of the guest cottage because there’s a perfect mix of sun and shade back there. You can turn pink ones into blue ones, if you add aluminum and coffee grounds to the soil. If you had spent more time helping me weed—you’ll remember that I did offer to pay you a dollar an hour—you might have picked up a thing or two about gardening and you wouldn’t be such a ninny now.”

“I was suffering from depression,” I confide, “and it tinged everything I felt and saw with a kind of watery grime so that I never really noticed anything, and the world was washed in a grainy, rain-soaked fog. It was like living in Belgium where you could go for weeks without seeing the sun. I remember reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and identifying with that that sense of dread and panic that he was describing. It was what I felt all the time.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of this Jean-Paul whosiwhatsit, and I’ve never been to Belgium. I thought there was plenty to learn about my own country without running off to Europe.”

“Sartre was an existentialist. He lived in Paris, and he believed that God was dead, that you had to create your own reality.”

“What bunk! I thank my lucky stars I never went to college. What good did it do you?”

“Do you know that the first poem I ever wrote was about you? It ended with a question, which I wanted to ask you but never could: Where will you go when you’re gone?”

“Well, I never! Imagine anyone writing a poem about such a fool thing as that! Let me tell you something, death is nothing, don’t waste your time thinking about it.”

I tell her all the things I’ve learned from the Internet about blue hydrangeas. I have to explain the Internet, which is a challenge, because, when she was alive, she was always talking about the good old days, and how the modern world was bunk. (She often said she wished she hadn’t lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, that people should stay on earth, where they belonged.) But when I explain that the information superhighway makes it possible to learn all kinds of things in an instant with the click of a mouse (I have to explain that a mouse is not something you catch in a trap), she perks up. I tell her about Wikipedia, and how you can look up Hydrangeas on it. I explain that there are 70-75 species of hydrangea, and that most come from China, Japan and Korea, and that the very first one was brought to England from a Chinese garden in 1739 by a Sir Joseph Banks. Of course, she has heard of Sir Joseph Banks; he was one of those brilliant, peripatetic Englishmen, an 18th century Charles Darwin, who traveled the globe and knew everyone and influenced everything, from the creation of Kew Gardens and the British Museum, to the colonizing of Australia. I tell her that Banks was apparently the model for a character in Mutiny on the Bounty.

We talk about all the poems that have been written about blue hydrangeas—about one by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, called “Blaue Hortensie.” It was written in Paris in 1906, when she was a girl of 14 and a student at the Emma Willard School in Troy. I read it aloud, not in German, because my German is primitive and she never learned the language (though she boasts that her older brother, George, who went to Oxford, knew German ‘like the back of his hand’). I read it aloud, as she used to read “A Hollow Tree,” and “Winnie the Pooh” to my sister and me in the library after dinner in the evenings.

Rilke’s poem is about the beauty of dying blue hydrangeas, comparing them to “old, blue notepaper notes,” and to the faded grays and violets of a “washed out children’s apron.” Rilke talks about how everything passes so quickly, how the dying flowers remind us of “life’s short duration.” But in the end as one blue umbel blooms against the green, there is a sense of life renewing itself.

“Of course, because hydrangeas are perennials,” she says, “and they come back, year after year.”

Then we say goodbye, and I promise that next spring, I will grow my very first blue hydrangea.

Acing the Blues

The funeral home sits so close to Rally Point that when my teammate and I were driving there from Massachusetts, her global positioning system cheerily announced, as we passed the sumptuous blue-and-white striped awnings, that we had arrived at our destination. This foot-faulting technological glitch made us laugh, soothing our nerves as we lugged our racquet bags and water coolers into the club, ready to play our first match at the United States Tennis Association’s New England District Adult League Championships in Greenville, Rhode Island.

Tennis in America began in Rhode Island—in nearby Newport, where the United States Lawn Tennis Association held the first Men’s Singles Championships on grass courts at the Newport Casino in 1881 (the event was not open to women but ladies’ competitions were held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1886). The Newport and Philadelphia championships added doubles competitions and evolved into the current U.S. Open at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, New York, played on DecoTurf II courts that were painted blue in 2005, in order to make the matches more telegenic.

Tennis, which was first played in the Middle Ages by monks during religious ceremonies and taken up by the French royal family in the 16^th century, gets its name from the French nobility’s habit of shouting, “Tenez,” or “Heads Up,” before starting the game. In the late 19^th century, tennis had overtaken croquet at the sport of choice for the leisured rich on both sides of the Atlantic. Lawn tennis courts, which could be grafted onto smooth croquet courts, appeared on estates owned by European barons and American robber barons alike, as well as on the grounds of watering holes and spas throughout Europe. Edith Jones Wharton learned to play tennis on her family’s private court at Pen Craig, one of the immense ‘cottages’ on Newport Sound. In 1876, a 14-year-old Edith Jones, writing to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, described the newfangled sport as “difficult, tiresome, destructive to pretty dresses and to the complexion, but nevertheless delightful.”

Not that I was focused on the history of tennis as I was playing the number two singles spot for the Aces Wild Tennis Team on court six. But I was thinking, during a long, sweat-soaked rally--indoor tennis in Rhode Island in mid-August can be punishingly hot--which ended when I whipped a cross-court forehand to a remote corner near the baseline where my opponent’s coltish 33-year-old legs would not take her, that there is nothing like tennis to free the mind from morbid thoughts of depression, failure, and death.

I have been playing tennis for most of my life—my mother, in the summer months when she wasn’t in bed with her mysterious colds, teaching me to play on hot, lazy afternoons at the Pittsfield Country Club, a sprawling, many-porched 19^th century mansion that Edith Wharton herself could have belonged to. I had a wooden racquet in those days, and the courts we played on were red clay, which turned everything—the service and base lines as well as our white Treetorn tennis balls, white tennis shoes, and white ankle socks with fuzzy pom poms at the heels--a rusted, dried-blood-colored pink. I had a two-fisted backhand (still do, though it was more of a lethal weapon in those days) in the manner of my heroine Chrissie Evert, who was already making a name for herself as a junior, and who would win the U.S. Open Women’s Singles in 1975, when it was played on Har-Tru clay courts at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills.

When my mother was well enough not to be indifferent to the fortunes of her daughters, she used to brag about how good I was. She saved all the trophies I had won in tennis tournaments throughout New England, and displayed them in the living room of our home on West Street. When she moved to Florida, she took them with her, proudly displaying them in the all condos and bungalows she inhabited. The story she liked best was the time I was in the finals of a 14-and-under tournament in New Haven--it was at the New Haven Lawn Club, founded in 1891, in the posh East Rock section of the city—and the club pro started watching me and told my mother I was good, that I could be really good, and that if she wanted to develop my game, she should send me to California to work with Pancho Segura, who had been number one in the world in 1952 and who was now coaching promising juniors, including legend-to-be Jimmy Connors.

“I taught her how to play myself,” my mother boasted to the pro, which wasn’t strictly true as I also played with my dad, particularly when I got good enough to beat my mom. In addition, I took several summers’ full of group and private lessons from Dudley Bell, who all the kids called Dud, and who had the good humor and patience of Segoo himself as he drilled me for hours in the split step.

“I know she’s good,” my mother went on, “But she’s only 14. I’m not taking her out of school and sending her to California. Anything could happen to her. She could be sold into ‘white slavery.’”

The pro wisely chose to ignore this bit of melodramatic foolishness and proposed that my mother accompany me to southern California.

“And let my husband fend for himself?” my mother said. “Not on your life.”

Chrissie Evert probably would have begged her mother to send her out west to play tennis—although it’s a moot point as Evert grew up in Florida and was coached from an early age by her tennis pro dad--but I didn’t argue with my mother. When you’re 14, you pretty much do what you’re told, especially if you’re a girl. Then, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association’s New England division rankings came out the next year (the organization dropped the snooty-sounding ‘lawn’ from its moniker a few years later), I had my first identifiable-as-such crisis of confidence. The number one player in the 14-and-under girls’ division was a big, muscular girl from Westerly, Rhode Island, and I had lost to her 6-0, 6-1 in another tournament several weeks after New Haven, barely even winning that one game. I had achieved the number five spot, which was hardly anything to cry about, but I knew very well that I was miles away from being number one. Maybe all the talk about Segura and California was just that—talk. Even if my mother had been willing to send me, I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be the best.

Then I did something only a crazy teenager could justify: I gave up tennis. I gave up the very thing that gave my emerging life passion and purpose. My reasons were as silly as a toddler’s: if I couldn’t get what I wanted, i.e., the number one spot in my age group, then I wouldn’t play. As the years passed and I found increasingly unwholesome activities to fill up the hours that tennis had occupied—taking up with a series of druggie boyfriends, who would have sold me into white slavery in a heartbeat if given the chance—I developed new reasons to spurn tennis. Tennis was a rich girl’s game, the mindless diversion of Republicans and Nixonites and corporate drones. Never mind that a smart, soft-spoken black man named Arthur Ashe, who learned to play tennis on segregated public courts in Richmond, Virginia, was busy winning majors and breaking the color line and speaking out against racism and apartheid.

I took up competitive tennis again when the Williams sisters started to dominate the women’s tour. I was moved by their story—how they grew up in the projects of Los Angeles and hit hundreds of balls every afternoon from an old shopping cart, how their parents heaped positive encouragement upon them, telling them, from an early age, that they were destined for greatness. There was really no connection between me, a middle-aged, overweight mom trying to adjust to a second marriage and working off her post-baby weight while playing in a local 4.0 USTA League in northern Vermont…and Venus and Serena, their dread-locks encased in white beads, screaming as they hit their 120-mile-an-hour serves, reaching the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 and 19, respectively. Then again, maybe Venus and Serena’s success--thanks to Venus’ efforts, women pros are now, for the first time in tennis history, making as much as men--made me believe that there was something about the game that whispered of hope and transformation, even to an old duffer like me, who wanted to drop twenty pounds and get a break from feeling like such a loser.

The Aces Wild Tennis Team did not ace the Districts in Rhode Island. In fact, we beat only one other team (and they were from western Massachusetts, and we had already trounced them three months ago so it hardly seemed like a real win). Most of the players on the other teams were younger, fitter, and steadier. Though many of us lost in nail-bitingly-close third-set tiebreakers—on Day two, I was taken out by a much younger woman in a match that went on for nearly three hours--it wasn’t enough to send us to the next level of competition—the Sectionals in South Hadley, Massachusetts. But as we headed home past the blue-and-white awnings of the Anderson-Winfield funeral home, stopping for ice cream at the Newport creamery just beyond the town green (not to be confused with the Blue Hills Crematory, whose services were being offered through the funeral home), we talked about how, next year, we were going to start practicing earlier, organize more scrimmages, maybe even do some clinics with the Amherst College assistant tennis coach.

Next year, we vowed, wiping the soft-serve, anti-oxidant-rich blueberry ice cream from our sweaty fingers and high-fiving one another, we were going to do it, advance to Sectionals, and, maybe, with a little luck and a lot of PMA (positive mental attitude), even to Nationals.