he hydrangea’s pink paint splattered down upon me one faraway startled summer in London when I was out on a walk. This flower amazes every new comer to London around Hydrangea time with its heart-stopping meditation techniques. All around the streets and lanes of London and its suburbs its pink petal surplus clambered over somebody’s entire 30 feet wall, to stop me in delight. Then it curled up in a pink mound under a beech tree. Near Kew Gardens it gave an entire post-box a scarf of scarlet and purple.
Just as drowning in delighted pink seemed to be a welcome threat from the universe, this mysterious flower’s purple plundering of colour stopped me again. A surplus thatch of flowers painted the sea-green grass under someone’s white window a bright blue. Further on, an enormous cottage of pale crimson hydrangeas forgave a, mediocre, block of dull grey new flats.
If you are in a London in June or July, you might easily become a walker, coaxed by the Hydrangea Trail.On a sweltering day in July, I came upon a little house proudly displaying its fat round ball of deep blue hydrangeas.
The next day, I found a block of flats that had covered their wall with these surplus hydrangea ruffles! A small vicarage in Surbiton and another in nearby Esher, also proudly showed off their hydrangea curtains. But here the flowers were pink! This is because the hydrangea has the magical ability to change its colours from pink to blue to lavender depending on the soil in which it is grown! Most magical of all is the fact that on one plant, you can have both blue and pink hydrangeas!
The cuttings from a blue hydrangea might turn the new flower into a pink one. In 1832 a gardening expert named John Loudon said that a mixture of sandy loam and fresh sheep’s dung could help change the hydrangea’s colours! They need a lot of water.
The American hydrangeas came to England in the eighteenth century. The name ‘hydrangea’ came from the Greek hydro (water) and aggeion (vessel).
Besides being the easiest flower to grow even in Bangalore, the hydrangea had yet another surprise in store.
If you want blue hydrangea flowers, keep your soil acid! Use an acid fertilizer or a constant mulch of leaves. You can also stick a few rusty nails into the soil to do it. If you want pink flowers add a touch of limestone to the soil!
This chameleon of pink and blue flowers that creates massive carpeting, wall-papering and entire roofing to show off its abundance seems to be meditating to convey the comforting truth that some kind of pink and blue richness sparkles so strongly inside us, that no-one can burgle it. Reminding us of Gerard Manley Hopkins whose poem God’s Grandeur says “…and for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
So even if the pink is in short supply at some uninvited time of woe, the purple and blue bliss has to be in plenty! Or vice versa!
