From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.
By Julia Beros
After receiving an unusual gift on her front porch, a Botany contractor goes on a journey through the Smithsonian collections to see if she can uncover the intentions of a mysterious neighbor.
The blue buds of Hydrangea macrophylla f. hortensia stand out in this specimen collected in 1986 by J.H.R. Plews in Kauai, Hawaii. The specimen is housed in the
U.S. National Herbarium.
It arrived as a bundle. Blue-tinged buds resting on the concrete, halfway into shade, aluminum folded and scrunched at the base molding to the shape of raw-cut branches wrapped in a damp paper towel, a single piece of twine wrapped infinitely around into a limp knot at the waistline. Exactly the way my mother prepared flowers for me to bring for “teacher appreciation week” in elementary school. It was always May, always the first bloom of lilacs. But exponentially wilting as the sun progressed, these blue buds waited anonymously for retrieval.
It was not just our house. Passing the open door I noticed the bundle and went to bring it in. I looked across to our neighbors, our street in quietness, and saw a similar bouquet limp at the steps to their door. Up the street I could see blue lumps at almost every doorstep. Something felt eerily significant about these blue hydrangeas donning every doorway. Something meaningful that could be de-coded. So discreet and common, maybe even a flower used as filler in a garden, hydrangeas never seemed so special. Bringing the flowers to show my mother, she smiled lightly, “they must be from someone on the street. How nice.” For her it ended there, “how nice,” but “how” is what I suddenly burned to understand. How did these blue buds arrive at all of our homes?
Our house is on a dead-end street, we know every resident of the 16 cape cods lining the road to a singular end, and there is a hyper-awareness of goings-ons. I set out for a walk and would determine which homes had blue hydrangeas growing in their yards. I wouldn’t consider homes without a bouquet on the doorstep because, like me, they could have already been picked up. Making a full venture to the park, so as not to arouse suspicion, I walked back down the street and noticed only a single yard with blue hydrangea bushes. This belonged to a couple with small dogs and children who are now adults that live far away. The wife can be seen walking the dogs while wearing a straw hat, her hair buoyantly curly and able to spark the jealousy of women with perms. She has the calm demeanor of a turtleneck worn stubbornly on a warm day, and the relaxed yet determined ambition of someone who knows themselves very well. The husband I’ve hardly spoken to, and his inconspicuousness is circumscribed by the single fact I know: that he is a writer of history and philosophy. It seemed unusually out-of-character that this neighbor might clip her flowers to share secretly with the rest of the street. But this was the only yard with blue buds.
What did I know about hydrangeas, who did I know that knows things about hydrangeas, don’t we have hydrangeas in our yard? Remembering the “snow bush” on the side of our house and my mother clipping these for bouquets, placing the branches in that murky blue vase, but soon replacing them with azaleas and leaving the white hydrangeas to bruise and shatter into the winter, and remembering the cluster of pink hydrangeas in the backyard, a fabled result of the pennies my dad used to bury in the soil near their roots, winking to me as he knelt to the dirt and we shared in this magical secret, and remembering that I always mixed up the name for hyacinth and hydrangea because my dad called them zumbul and I didn’t learn the name hyacinth until it no longer mattered. With the resources of the Smithsonian and the U.S. National Herbarium at my disposal, I began digging around for some scientific and cultural information about hydrangeas, perhaps leading me to the meaning of these doorstep bouquets. Using the Smithsonian Collection Search Center, I searched for clues where Smithsonian collections contain hydrangeas.
