Best hydrangea year ever

Nikko Blue

We had such a mild winter this last time that none of my macrophylla hydrangeas got frostbitten, no buds dropped, nothing. They started growing early in the spring, never got nipped by late frosts, just kept on growing and budding. When June came, so did the big mops of blossoms, one on top of another, buckets and bundles of hydrangeas, everywhere I looked, in light blue, dark blue, white, lavender, violet, blue-violet, red-violet and purple. The ones shaped like big round mounds, the ones that were odd collections of previously frozen sticks—all were lush and lovely with blooms.

The Merritt's Beauty was one of the fullest ones, three years old and never frozen. Its buds first showed a combination of striking deep sapphire and white, then opened up gradually to a rich, even cobalt blue.

Merritt's Beauty

Many of them I have no names for, grabbed here and there at plant sales and clearance bins, even florist shops in department stores. The blue-violet one in the back I call the bigger-than-your-head hydrangea because a fully mature flower head is big enough for me to wear as a hat.

Unknown or unnamed varieties, early in the season with still normal-sized blooms

There's a long row of mopheads planted in the section I call the grotto, where the soil stays wet in the summer and there's little sun.

More unknowns

My grandmother had two big blue mopheads growing outside her apartment near the southern California coast; I first saw them when I was in junior high, and I'd never seen any flower that I thought was so beautiful. From that first sight, I wanted some. I never had a chance to grow them till I moved to Oregon, and as soon as I started gardening here I started buying them and planting them. I lost several during the hard freezes of '08 and '09, and it's a constant chore to keep them all watered during the dry season. More than once I've thought of how much easier my summers would be if I didn't have to worry about them. But they're so gorgeous, those great swaths of blues and purples, fading to green, blue-green, slate-blue, and mauve through late summer and fall, till they finally go brown and slowly fall apart over the winter—I can't imagine my garden without them. Even when the two-day hot, unrelenting wind came in August and crisped bits of all of them, I knew that next year—barring a really bad freeze—they'll all be back again, bigger and bluer and better than before. If we ever have a serious drought, I may lose all of them. But until then, I'll just keep loving them.