Where are the blooms

The dirty little secret is that we don’t live in Japan, or Cape Cod, or the Hamptons, and our climate is perfectly suited for killing hydrangea flower buds. This is why Madonna is so pissed off! She’s sick and tired of being teased with the promise of beautiful, bodacious blooms only to be fooled, faked, and frustrated by season after season of flowerless foliage.Some would argue that the new reblooming hydrangeas have solved the problem. Sure, the industry has selected and hybridized remontant (reblooming) varieties such as Endless Summer®, Forever & Ever®, Mini Penny® and the remarkable Let’s Dance® series, but have we really solved the problem? Are people suddenly happy with their hydrangeas? Has Madonna changed her tune? No. Not really, because while all of these hydrangeas rebloom to some degree or another, they typically don’t live up to expectations.

Madonna was caught on camera emphatically stating that she “loathes” hydrangeas. And while some have criticized her for her harsh words, I don’t begrudge her. After all, she was only expressing a view shared by millions of people. Yes, millions for people loathe hydrangea. So how can it be that a beautiful flowering shrub evokes such disdain? It’s simple, really. For years, Martha Stewart and her East Coast friends have shown us an endless stream of outrageously beautiful hydrangeas, covered with big, colorful blooms - but they failed to tell us something important. We need to move to Cape Cod to get them to flower. That’s right, you have to move to the coast to get hydrangeas to bloom like they do in the magazines! That’s because these bigleaf hydrangeas, Hydrangea macrophylla, have evolved in the mild maritime climate of coastal Japan.

These plants detest the harsh continental climate of the Midwest with its wacky spring weather that ping-pongs between 85 and 20 degrees; their flower buds swell up and are zapped like flies in an electric bug killer. The problem remains that our crazy spring weather kills the old-wood flower buds (or stems) of these new varieties just as well as it killed the buds (and stems) of the old varieties. Unless we have an unusually mild spring or lots of snow-cover, the flower buds are killed and you don’t get the reblooming flowers until late summer or fall. And this sparse, late season flower display looks nothing like the June blooms they get in Cape Cod. No wonder Madonna loathes hydrangea: she’s from Michigan, not the East Coast!