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Health & Fitness

Chem 101 Meets the Garden ... With Fascinating Results

Hydrangeas appeal to the 'mad scientist' in this North Fork gardener.

Dirt’s dirt, right? Not exactly. A friend snapped these photos of hydrangea blooming away in my yard. One is flowering blue, the other an unruly pinkish purple---same plant,  one in the backyard and the other on the west side of the house. They are separated by less than the length of a football field.  If I tinkered with the soil around them, the colors could reverse. As is, I wound up with a crazy blend of blue and pink on a single bush. Apparently, hyrdrangea is one of the few plants that behaves this way.   

The trick is soil acidity. If the dirt tests in pH range of 5.0–5.5 or lower, the flowers will end up blue; if higher than 5.8,  pink.  To increase acidity, add 3 or so teaspoons of sulfur [aluminum sulfate] into the dirt for a foot all around a plant about an inch deep. If you work in lime, it  will reduce acidity. One gardener claims deliberately working lime into one side of the plant roots and sulphur into the other with result in some very interesting color combinations. Supposedly those mixed color blossoms can also come about as the plant adjusts from one soil condition to the other.

To tell the truth, I didn’t do either one. I just let the plants do their thing. The results were certainly amazing with no help at all from me!

A bonus is the way these huge and spectacular flower-heads can be dried and used in floral arrangements indoors all winter. This will work best if you wait until the flower-heads begin to dry themselves  out on the bush before cutting and bringing them indoors. Timing is all. If you wait too long and the garden hits a rainy spell,  you will have lost the color---the flowers will turn brown. When that happened to me one year, I just cut them anyway, spray painted them gold and used them to create a Christmas-y floral display.

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