White hydrangeas
What’s looking good now?
Hydrangeas are the bu of many a garden joke. They’re usually represented by the mopheads and lacecaps. For the most part they’re pink or blue and their colour depends on the alkalinity of the soil.
Forget about them, the best hydrangeas are white. Not only do they look just the ticket in any planting scheme, but if you go for selected forms of the most outstanding species you’ll also be introducing charismatic shrubs with huge presence. With the minimum of care they’ll add stature to mixed borders or autumn depth to shady plantings. All hydrangeas prefer humus-rich soil that doesn’t dry out. Improve their chances by adding plenty of well-ro ed organic material before planting.
One of their charms is that flowers continue to exercise allure for months and when eventually they fade, their death is graceful. Finally, they can be severed from the plant in the course of pruning and admired for months more indoors. Those in the know grow the superb white mophead, H. macrophylla ‘Soeur Thérèse’. This does best in partial shade.
Hydrangea paniculata does what it says, producing large terminal panicles of flower, cone-shaped collections of tiny, fertile flowers and very visible sterile florets. Some gardeners prize the new, flashier forms of H. paniculata, where breeders have concentrated their a ention on trying to produce pink varieties. Although many are noteworthy, white varieties, such as ‘Unique’, with weighty heads of pure white flower are exquisite. Quirky, but lovely, the flowers of ‘Greenspire’ always stay on the green side of white. On a similar scale, H.quercifolia has similar, though less ostentatious, flowers with the bonus of rich autumn colour and H. arborescens ‘Annabelle’ smothers itself with pom-poms of pure white. Peerless!