Hydrangea
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| Hydrangeas at the V&A |
There are over a hundred species of Hydrangeas, a flowering
shrub native to eastern Asia, with a few species also growing in North and
South America. Hydrangeas come in white or in colors ranging from pink to tones
of blue and purple, the exact shade depending on the acidity of the surrounding
soil, which affects the uptake of aluminum ions: dressing with aluminum sulfate
increases the acidity and turns certain species blue, while dressing with lime
reduces acid and pushes others towards pink (Hogan 716). Some hydrangeas have
flower heads that are round and look like poms-poms; the “lace caps” are
flatter, and there are also climbing varieties. All varieties are made up of
two kinds of flowers: the tiny flowerets, often in the center of the flowerhead,
are fertile; they are typically surrounded by larger, more dramatic sepals,
often with four petals. Most have leaves
with serrated edges and are deciduous. The most common species, the so-called
“florist hydrangea,”is Hydrangea
macrophylla (named for its big-leaf); climbing hydrangeas are usually Hydrangea petiolaris.
The name “Hydrangea” comes from the Greek for water, hydros and jar, angos, which refers to the shape of the plant’s
fruit, but is especially appropriate since, according to a site called
ProFlowers, they require “constant moisture to stay happy, healthy, and
blooming.”[1] Hydrangeas generally bloom from late spring
to mid-summer, though the flower heads can last into the autumn.
Hydrangeas were introduced into Europe in the
1700’s. According to Naomi Slade’s detailed history, John Bartram sent an
American variety to England in 1736, but the Japanese varieties had to be covertly
imported during the nineteenth century (17-8).
Although the famous Veitch nursery in England acquired some plants, they
did not become popular until French breeders developed them. When displayed at the
National Horticultural exhibition in Paris in 1901, hydrangeas became an
immediate sensation (18). However,
according to Slade, the UK lagged behind in appreciation, partially because
early French varieties were bred for growth in pots and consequently “didn’t
always perform well when transferred to the garden” and so “got a reputation
for not being hardy" (19).
Because hydrangeas were introduced into England
comparatively late, near the end of the eighteenth century, they have left
little trace in folklore or literature. None of my usual sources on the
cultural meanings of flowers have anything to say about them. In fact, what symbolism is attached to them
seems fairly negative. Greenaway lists their meaning as “A boaster.
Heartlessness”(22), and ProFlower concurs, saying that they “were used to
declare arrogance and boastfulness,” speculating that the association was based
“based on the
ability of the plant to produce many flowers but very few seeds.” The attribute of infertility was extended
even further as “English men in the later 1800s used to send hydrangeas to women who
rejected them, accusing them of frigidity,” an account repeated by Naomi Slade
in her book on hydrangeas (8)
For Woolf,
the chief attribute of hydrangeas appears to be their blueness. Nine of the thirteen times they are mentioned
in her writing they are specifically blue.
They first appear in print in the essay on the fascinating “Miss
Ormerod,” pioneer etymologist and inventor of Paris Green, a highly toxic
insecticide also used in killing rats in the Paris sewers. When an
acquaintance, Miss Lipscomb, stops to paint the “lovely hydrangeas against the
sky” in Penzance, she learns from the local market gardener that he owes
“everything he had” to a lady who, when his flowers and crops were failing,
sent him a book called “In-ju-ri-ous
In-sects” which saved his livelihood (E4 136, 137). While the color of
these is not specified (a google search of “hydrangeas + St. Ives or Penzance”
shows a distinct tendency to pinkness), the hydrangeas which show up in Mrs. Dalloway, the proofs of which Woolf
was revising as she wrote “Miss Ormerod,” are distinctly blue.
Sally Seaton and Peter Walsh are
the characters linked to “blue hydrangeas” in Mrs. Dalloway. Writing a “long,
gushing letter” about “blue hydrangeas” to Peter, Sally Seaton boasts of having
“married a rich man” and living “in a large house near Manchester,” and
declares that the flowers make her think of Peter “and the old days” (70), a
letter Peter later recalls as he thinks of how Clarissa “had influenced him
more than any person he had ever known” (150). Associating Clarissa in his mind
with “one scene after another at Bourton,” he mediates on how memories can be
sparked “by the oddest things” such as Sally’s connection of him with blue
hydrangeas (150, 149). Later, when Sally
arrives at the party, she tells Clarissa she has “five enormous boys,” and
Clarissa reflects “She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be
thought first always” (167). When Sally and Peter meet, Sally continues to “go
on . . . hour after hour,” talking about how people thought she had married
beneath her, her five sons, and her acres of greenhouses in which she grows
hydrangeas, among other rarities (186). In these passages, hydrangeas are
clearly linked with Sally’s boastfulness, but also, though various tunnels,
back to the edenic gardens of Bourton, whose squeaking hinges, French windows,
rising rooks, and tobacco flowers (3, 184) have Cornish roots.
The next
mention of hydrangeas, in a diary entry of April 1930 about a visit to the vast
Waddesdon greenhouses in [2]
Alice
Charlotte von Rothschild, aka “It struck me, what madness, & how easy to pin ones
mind down to the blueness of hydrangeas, & to hypnotise Mr Johnson into
thinking only of the blueness of hydrangeas. He used to go to her every
evening, for she scarcely saw anyone, & they would talk for two hours about
the plants & politics. How easy to go mad over the blueness of hydrangeas
& think of nothing else” (301).
As
in Mrs. Dalloway, the hydrangeas
serve as part of the scene that links past and present. Mrs Ivimey, the teller
of the tale, identifies so strongly with her story that she imitates the
movements she is narrating: “Mrs. Ivimey opened her arms and then closed them
as if she were kissing someone” (CSF 272). When she is caught for a moment in
the shaft of the searchlight, she “had something blue on her head” as if she
still retains a scrap of the hydrangeas (272).
Woolf’s last hydrangea also serves to illuminate a passing
moment. In Between the Acts, as Isa stalks out to the greenhouse after a brief quarrel with her
husband in which she rebukes and rejects him over his inevitable impending
infidelity, she puases for a moment just inside the door where William Dodge,
following her, sees her “standing against the green glass, the fig tree, and
the blue hydrangea” with a knife in her hand, a vivid, almost pre-Rapaelite
vision of a “statue in a greenhouse,” ambivalent in its connotations of
fertility and infertility, arrogance and despair (BTA 78).[3]
See Works Cited for full documentation
[2]
According to an on-line history of the Waddesdon Glasshouses by garden
historian Sophie
Piebenga, the main glasshouse, “known as ‘Top Glass’ was made up of fifty
different compartments. . . . Beyond this was a huge, 400 ft. long wall with a
‘lean-to’ glasshouse, the so-called Fruit Range. This long glasshouse was
divided into nine sections, devoted to the production of fruit including:
cherries, figs, grapes, peaches, vines and strawberries.” (One can see why
Leonard Woolf would be particularly interested.) During the war, the greenhouses sold produce
to the surrounding communities, but “the operation was scaled down” in the late
1950’s when the family moved elsewhere and the glasshouses were torn down in
the 1970’s. The grounds can still be
visited.
[3] I have slightly misquoted Woolf here: William
Dodge is thinking about women in general resenting “serving as statues in a
greenhouse” when they learn that he is gay and not attracted to them. But I
felt the image of the statue was particularly relevant to Isa.
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