It is the season of white hydrangeas. Hydrangeas are very useful shrubs, flowering in later summer and many happily accepting light shade. For that reason you will often see them planted in woodland gardens, sometimes as a later addition to gardens that started off as private havens with the main season in the spring. Who knows where their owners were later on in the year, maybe doing the London season and then shooting in Scotland? Once open to the public there was a commercial imperative to offer more to interest the paying visitors in the summer, which is after all the main holiday season.
I have three different white hydrangeas quite close together, in a not too dry part of a north facing border. At this time of the year they gleam with a cool green light down the full length of the garden. The first is Hydrangea quercifolia, the oak leaf hydrangea. As the name suggests the leaves are lobed like an oak tree, albeit an American rather than an English one. The flowers are held in upright panicles, opening over a period of time from tight green buds. The individual flowers are quite large, over a centimetre across, with four broad overlapping petals veined in green. Later in the season the leaves will turn a rich burgundy red, and hang on the bush for a long time. I have never pruned it, and regular pruning is not considered necessary, but according to George E. Brown's excellent book on the pruning of trees, shrubs and conifers (published by Faber. Mine is the 1987 edition but there is a revised version which is even better) weak or poor bushes can be pruned hard and will throw up strong new shoots from the base.
Next to the oak leaved hydrangea is a form of H. paniculata called 'Limelight'. Putting them next to each other speaks of me trying to find a damp enough spot to cram another one in, but the contrast in forms works very well. 'Limelight' also has upright panicles of flowers, but they are daintier than those of its neighbour, the individual flowers smaller. 'Limelight' has grown taller, to a good couple of metres, and hovers above the sturdier H. quercifolia, carrying the same floral idea to a higher and more ethereal level. The flowers have a strong greenish tinge. I haven't pruned this one either, but could if I wanted to restrict its height or stimulate the production of fewer but larger flowers. The paniculata forms flower on wood made earlier in that same year, so reducing the old wood down to a short framework acts as a form of disbudding and concentrates the plant's energies into fewer shoots, as Brown explains. The time to prune would be February, and feeding and mulching should follow.
Just around the corner behind the monster bamboo (another session with the pickaxe looms) is Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle', which has domes of flowers, in a less green shade of white than the other two. H. arborescens can be pruned in the same way as the paniculata forms, and I must prune and feed mine next winter, as the clusters of flowers are not nearly so large as they should be. They should be enormous. Someone I know has a fine specimen by the front door, in a purple and white design that includes the black grass-like (actually a member of the lily family) Ophiopogon nigrescens, and a copper beech hedge, and looking at what the shrub is capable of reminded me of how far from its full potential mine is. 'Annabelle' is much beloved by garden designers, which is fair enough, as it is a handsome shrub and holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit. It sits equally well in a colour themed urban chic design, or a rambling country garden.
Hydrangeas have a reputation for changing colour according to the acidity or alkalinity of the soil, but this is mainly a feature of H. macrophylla, and even with those the white ones tend to stay white whatever the soil pH, according to my guide to hydrangeas by Toni Lawson-Hall and Brian Rothera.
Addendum We listened to Feedback on R4 while finishing lunch and doing the washing up. There have been complaints that the BBC weather forecasts are getting too poetic. I wouldn't mind if they read the weather entirely in iambic pentameters, as long as they got it right.
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