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.