I would love to have a hydrangea bush in my garden. Alas, I have tried and not succeeded at keeping one from getting eaten by deer. Fortunately, I have a friend who has beautiful bushes that she clipped and used to help me create lovely table arrangements for my 25th wedding anniversary last year. And fortunately, you can find hydrangea at the florist all year round.
They make lush additions to wedding bouquets. Pink, white or blue, they can almost act as a backdrop to smaller flowers. In fact, I used a silk white hydrangea as the base for my DIY brooch bouquet—also for my 25th event. (To make your own brooch bouquet, see my blog).
According to my sources, hydrangea signify thank you for understanding, frigidity, heartlessness, heartless. Hmm, I suspect they added the first meaning in case you didn’t want to send the message that someone is heartless. I can’t imagine why anyone would find hydrangea anything but frilly and pretty and lovely. If you are lucky enough to be able to grow them, share them with ones you love!
Over and Over Stitch
By Jorie Graham
Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms
hold still for just a moment longer.
Nothing looks satisfied,
but there is no real reason to move on much further:
this isn’t a bad place;
why not pretend
we wished for it?
The bushes have learned to live with their haunches.
The hydrangea is resigned
to its pale and inconclusive utterances.
Towards the end of the season
it is not bad
to have the body. To have experienced joy
as the mere lifting of hunger
is not to have known it
less. The tobacco leaves
don’t mind being removed
to the long racks—all uses are astounding
to the used.
There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—
noon, for instance, or all the single victories
of gravity, or the kudzu vine,
most delicate of manias,
which has pressed its luck
this far this season.
It shines a gloating green.
Its edges darken with impatience, a kind of wind.
Nothing again will ever be this easy, lives
being snatched up like dropped stitches, the dry stalks of daylilies
marking a stillness we can’t keep.
XOXO Rachel
Wondrance 