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.
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.
“Hydrangea”, or sometimes “Hortensia,” and sometimes “Seven Bark,” is an easy-care shrub growing readily in zones 3-9. Varying in leaf-shape and growth habit this plant is believed to have been originally cultivated in Asia. They have two flower types on their head, the small ones like specks dotting the air, and the big showy ones with large tepals floating above, creating either pom-pom or lace-cap silhouettes. Their color changes in accordance with aluminum ions which can be influenced by soil pH, and therefore have some correlation with the myth that pennies added to the soil will increase the acidity and in effect change the color expression of the blooms. There are numerous species of hydrangeas and they have been widely cultivated for the exploitation of these traits, namely their chemical vulnerability for color expression, making them an abundantly beloved garden shrub.
A recent cultivar of Hydrangea quercifolia introduced by the U.S. National Arboretum, “Ruby Slippers,” donning the name of Dorothy’s famous shoes and a striking red hue at maturity, and a commemorative stamp from 1995 (when postage had just increased to 32 cents an ounce) depicting blue hydrangea buds are proof of this plant’s versatility as a cultural icon. Fabrics and wallpapers, friezes and borders, block prints and mulberry paper with delicately sewn hydrangea buds (and a bizarre wax figurine of a bouquet housed in a glass bell) are preserved by the Cooper Hewitt Museum representing its place in American design history.
Left: A 1995 postage stamp with a blue hydrangea, from the National Postal Museum. Copyright United States Postal Service. All rights reserved.
Right: A wallcovering featuring hydrangeas, from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, c. 1905–1915.
Included in the history book Foxfire Volume 11 is a detailed description of wild hydrangea, Hydrangea arborescens: According to Appalachian tradition wild hydrangea is called “Seven bark” for the peeling layers of bark revealing different colors. It has slim stems and heart-shaped toothy leaves. Some recorded uses include chewing the bark for stomach and heart troubles, but readers are warned against gathering the bark, as it has “caused painful gastroenteritis and cyanide-like poisoning.” The shrub is collected mainly for the root, juicy and tender, and used for kidney and bladder troubles. These traditional medicines, with roots in Native American cultures that spread through folkloric American traditions, proliferated in pharmacies. Examples of these medicinal histories are preserved as “materia medica” in the National Museum of American History, labeled “crude drugs.” Many were developed by the Eclectic School of American Practitioners (founded in the 1830s) as an early form of nontraditional medicine. Diuretic tablets, elixirs, and extracts are other common preparations of this plant in commercial medicine.
Left: A wax bouquet from the National Museum of American History, with was flowers depicting roses, lilies, carnations, dahlias, hydrangeas, lilies-of-the-valley, peonies, Virginia bluebells and more, c. 1859-1865.
Right: Boericke & Tafel Diuretic Tablets, 1975, with hydrangea as one of its main ingredients, from the National Museum of American History.
In the National Museum of Asian Art there are block prints, paintings, and ceramic kettles and pots with detailed images of hydrangea blooms, very often accompanied by a butterfly. Dating from the Edo, Meiji (that marked by the dramatic shift in international relations), and Taisho periods in Japan, botanical histories as well as cultural and political exchange can be subtly gleaned through these artworks. In the National Museum of African American History and Culture there are photos and portraits of “The Taylor family women'' taken at Playfair in Martha’s Vineyard with descriptive transcriptions noting, “behind the women at proper right is a hydrangea bush.” These candid moments of family and life in the 1950s are now archived in a museum, and are supplemented by the appearance of a hydrangea. Outside the museum itself, creamy blooms of hydrangea plantings line the plaza as visitors linger around the entrance posing for their own memories.
Left: Japanese Banko ware serving dish with design of bird and hydrangea, c. 1740-1799, from the Freer Gallery of Art.
Center: A 1950s photograph of three women from the Taylor family posing in a yard in Martha's Vineyard, with a hydrangea bush behind them. Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Right: A 1955 silver gelatin print depicting an image of a woman seated on a settee with a small hydrangea bouquet resting on top of her hand. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In almost every corner of the Smithsonian Institution collections there are hydrangeas. Many are examples of decorative ornamentation, but these too enhance our scientific collections. More than cultural objects, these are unique representations of the plant at a certain time in a certain place, just like an herbarium sheet. As type collections in the herbarium are the didactic representation of a species, the physical iteration of its definition, collectively the various types of representations of a plant depict where it has been, what it serves and symbolizes, and where it may go in our society. How we use or covet a plant, how we have altered it and likely how it has altered us, how we use this plant to relate to other aspects of our culture and ultimately to each other, are represented in the various preservations of hydrangeas. These hydrangeas mark moments, deeply personal and sentimental as well as historic and momentous, and place our study of biology within the context of social science, and continue to enhance our perspective. In the U.S. National Herbarium there are of course plentiful representations of pressed hydrangea specimens. Among the various species, H. arguta a short leafy shrub endemic to Hawaii, or H. quercifolia with its giant leaves resembling an oak, one stands out: an H. macrophylla f. hortensia, USNH number 3283045, a singular and robust stalk of blue buds, like a mug shot of the unidentified blooms from my doorstep.
Suddenly there were blue buds everywhere. I could see them lining every lawn and peeking from backyards behind house corners, their colors echoed in the faded pink and blue surgical masks smocked with white folds worn around town. I was fixated on a very specific color: the powdery blue of a nail file I’ve been dulling for 6 months, the fluorescent blue of a plastic star that’s supposed to glow at night in my room, even the flashing specks of a neighbor’s recycle bin hidden behind a bush, all potentially hydrangeas. How had I overlooked all the clearly existent blue buds before, had they been changing color over the summer? Was everyone in my neighborhood on to me and my hydrangea fixation and suddenly planting bushes to throw me off? Is it possible that I had concocted a narrative in my subconscious that I could follow without logic overlooking the many yards with blue buds, could this be how we so often “miss the obvious” when it was seemingly right in front of us all along? A mood ring for aluminum, able to change so subtly and without notice, the hydrangeas were always there. Always everywhere. With or without the projection of cultural meaning. I pass my neighbor’s house every day, sometimes I see her dogs at the window through partly lifted shades, or see a raccoon scramble off the fence at night, and I see the change of her blue hydrangea bush, the buds few and almost purple now, hiding under big green leaves. Nobody on the street ever mentioned the blue buds, nobody really cares, and it really wasn’t that compelling of an event. I doubt this neighbor was even the culprit of this charming gesture but I pass her house and think “how nice.”
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