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The World of the Hydrangea
By admin | July 26, 2006
Its the heart of the summer and time to really begin to get your hands dirty and your garden growing. Its time to do what you can now for the rest of this summer and to begin thinking about the seasons ahead.
For the next few weeks we will provide our readers with some basic and hopefully useful information on specific types of garden flowers and plants. Make sure you come back every day to learn a little bit more and get some fancy ideas on how to enhance your gardens look and style.
Hydrangea is a famly of about 70-75 species of flowering plants native to southern and eastern Asia (from Japan to China, the Himalaya and Indonesia) and North and South America. For sure the biggest species diversity is located around the eastern Asia corner of the world, specifically around China and Japan. Most Hydrangea are shrubs 1-3 meters tall, though some are midget trees, while others such as Lianas can reach up to 30 m by using and climbing up trees. Hydrangeas can be either deciduous or evergreen, though the widely cultivated temperate species are all deciduous.
Hydrangea flowers are produced from early spring to late autumn; so make sure you plant now for the seasons ahead! they grow in flowerheads (corymbs or panicles) at the ends of the stems and need plenty of water, so make sure your hosereel is in good condition and ready for the jobs ahead. In many species, the flowerheads contain two types of flowers, small fertile flowers in the middle of the flowerhead, and large, sterile bract-like flowers in a ring around the edge of each flowerhead. Other species have all the flowers fertile and of the same size.
In most species the flowers are white, but in many the flowers can gorw blue, red, pink, purple or in some wonderful cases a wild mixture. In these species the exact colour often depends on the pH of the soil; acidic soils produce blue flowers, neutral soils produce very pale cream petals, and alkaline soils results in pink or purple. Take a PH test to your hose reel faucet to predict the colour of your Hydrangeas
Hydrangeas are one of very few plants that accumulate aluminium. Aluminium is released from acidic soils, and in some species, forms complexes in the hydrangea flower giving them their blue colour.
Hydro-Industries - Watering Gardens in 2006 and onwards.
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