Unlike a certain someone, I absolutely love hydrangeas, even if they don’t always love me back. Our soil is not quite acidic enough to uniformly color these beauties deep blue, so they vacillate between purple and pink, especially as they mature. Some days, though, if the light is just right, and the sky is helping tilt them in the right direction, they’ll appear the closest to blue they’ll ever get. (By the way, you can nudge them into the blue region by modifying the soil to the acidic side. Many myths exist as to how best do this – coffee grounds, rusty nails in the soil, a diluted sulphuric solution – all go towards bringing out the blue in some hydrangeas.)
This variety is the now-ubiquitous ‘Endless Summer’ hybrid that blooms on new wood. Many hydrangeas only bloom on old wood, and if you have particularly punishing winters as we do in upstate New York, you can’t count on the buds surviving. Varieties like ‘Endless Summer’ provide blooms every year, so you need not worry so much when the winter turns harsh.
