August 2023
Back in the 90s, when I was living in London, a guest brought me a potted white hydrangea. When it outgrew the pot, I planted it in the garden, where it promptly died. This was my sole experience of hydrangeas before I moved to La Laguna in 2010.
The hydrangea beds here were the pride of the previous owners, whose buying expeditions had taken them all over northern Spain. Since the earth in much of the garden is so shallow, they’d also had to truck in tons of soil to create the beds in the first place. After fifteen years they had a collection of some 180 waist-high shrubs that produced a sea of blossom in a dozen colours. On the summer day when I first saw them, they were at their peak, a mix of flower-heads the size of cabbages, interspersed with delicate flat lacy ones and leaves that ranged from bright green to deep burgundy.
Captivated, I ransacked the internet for guidance on fertilising, pruning and dead-heading, spraying, watering and propagating. Much of what I read focussed on ways of getting the hydrangeas to change colour, but since I liked their existing colours, I just concentrated on keeping them vigorous and pest-free. This proved to be less of a challenge than I’d feared: indeed, now that we are so used to one another, I can honestly say that for much of the year they almost take care of themselves. They seem to have no predators, since the spiders that create enormous, intricate webs among their leaves do them no harm. There’s a drip-feed watering system in place, but the hydrangeas seldom need it, since their leaf canopies conserve water admirably. Most importantly, they can resist almost anything our unpredictable mountain weather throws at them.
Everything, that is, except a late spring freeze. Two of these, in 2017 and 2019, wrought terrible damage, requiring wholesale cutting-back to about 20” above the ground. Even the pandemic, which prevented me from employing any help for two years, was less devastating. In 2022 the hydrangeas began their sporadic recovery and are now taller than ever, but this year is really the first that rivals the splendid floral displays of the years before 2017. One new development (in contradiction to all the lore about giving them copper or aluminium or some other mineral) is that a long line of formerly pink hydrangeas has turned intensely blue without any interference from anyone. Perhaps they’ll turn back again? It wouldn’t surprise me.