Category: Garden, Growing Flowers

Endless Summer Goes From Blue to Lavender, Pink or Green

Color changes in the hydrangea flower as the season progresses brings green, pink and blue blooms.

This page is about growing hydrangeas in my New England yard. The soil is naturally acidic and it is not difficult to grown blue flowering hydrangeas. However, as the season progresses, those blue flowers turn into pinks and greens and even unique blue colors.

lavender hydrangea flower
This flower went from blue to lavender

My beautiful blue Endless Summer hydrangea flower turned to light lavender as last season progressed. Sometimes the blues turn pink, or even green. It’s what makes growing hydrangeas so exciting, the fact that flowers will start out one color and turn to something completely different.

I love this gorgeous light purple flower. The newly planted shrub is not very large and last year it had only about 5 or 6 blooms. The heavy weight of the flowers on the smaller stems weighed them down, but each year the plant will do better.

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Endless Summer that has turned light green in Fall

Right now it’s too early to see much happening with my hydrangea bushes. I keep coming across pictures I took last summer and fall, so I’ll have to share those for the time being.

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A blue flower drying on the stem in Autumn turns all kinds of gorgeous colors

I won’t be buying any more new plants, as I am currently on a very tight budget, but I plan to propagate hydrangeas from the plants I already have.

Propagating from the endless summer and mop-head varieties is easy, but it takes time and some planning.  Some people start plants from cuttings, but I have not had luck with that.

Another flowering hydrangea in my yard is fun to watch. The Pink Winky has elongated flowers that turn from white to pink. It is a gorgeous bush.

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My newer blog posts are about gardening in my Florida backyard.

Pictures of the Lenton Rose

The unique lenton rose flower will poke out of the snow in early spring.

This is a photo blog post showing some images of the two Lenton rose (hellebore) plants growing in my yard. This is a new plant for me to grow, but I love the fact that the buds form and flowers bloom in mid-April. Sometimes there is still snow on the ground!

It’s a pleasant thing to find flowers blooming after a long, cold winter.

Hellebore Flowers are Unique

Besides blooming early in Spring before most other perennials, the flowers of the Lentos Rose are unique.

Flower colors can be pink, beige, white, light green or spotted. The flowers will stay on the plant and turn color too.

lenton rose spring buds
blooming lenton rose
lenton rose

Early blooming hellebores can bloom before daffodils and tulips!

single lenton rose flower
lenton rose green flowers

The flower is unique and comes in a variety of colors.  The light green flower is coveted by brides for their wedding bouquets.  Finding green flowers in nature is always a treat, but the light pink and spotted varieties are stunning as well.

This is one plant that I would like to have more of in my garden. This perennial is easy to grow and blooms profusely. As you can see, the leaves are nice and green even after being covered in snow all winter!   After the flowering stops, the green leaves continue to grow all summer and add interest to the landscape.

I’ll keep my eyes open for other varieties when I visit the local nursery this year.

Tulips in Spring Snow

tulips in snow
Spring Snow

April has been a pretty cold month for us in the northeast. It seems like it’s unseasonably cold, with just a few really nice days so far. Plants are pushing up through the ground even though we had a few inches of snow about a week ago.
I got this photo of my tulips that were growing nicely when they suddenly had to endure a coating of the white stuff. The heavy snow in this late snowfall clung to the trees and made for some opportunities for good pictures. I went outside early that morning to get some local photos before the wind and warm sun removed the snow from the tree branches. I really didn’t need to hurry as the day never warmed up all that much and there were snow patches left the next day as well.
The lenton roses are blooming as they do in the early Spring, but so far not much else is providing color other than green.
It’s a good time of year to clean up the beds, before the black flies show up. So I cleared the back garden of stray blackberry briers that constantly try to invade my tiny garden space. And I removed the leaves that have been covering the dirt.
Next I will order some garden loam to fill my fabric beds and get them ready for planting in about a month. I just hope the weather will eventually get nice and warm, and I suppose it will.

I’m Learning How to Grow Lilacs

white lilac flowers

I look forward to seeing my hydrangeas grow and bloom this year, but first I will see the lilacs bloom. I don’t have very impressive lilac bushes, I will admit. The yard is very shady and I am not used to dealing with this type of plant. Lilacs don’t grow in Florida, where I lived for a long time. They thrive in US hardiness zones 3-7 and central Florida is in zone 9.

So I have been trying to help my Lilacs do better in the once-neglected yard of my newer house. The tall, gangly tree / bush at the corner of my house was tucked under a pine tree and hidden behind a piece of fence. Now the fence is gone, and so is the little pine. I’m hoping that now the lilac will get more sun and branch out and get bushy.

I know that it’s a good idea to trim off the flowers as they die and then leave the tree alone. Trimming too late will remove the blooms that set for the following year. Also do any pruning then too.

I recently learned something about pruning the suckers, or shoots that grow from the base of the shrub. I always thought I needed to remove them all so the main trunk would do better, but that is not so. I’ve read that only 2/3 of the suckers should be cut so the others can grow and fill in the shrub. I am going to try it.

My lilac flowers are dark purple. I don’t know if they are double blooms or not, but double bloom varieties are more fragrant. I counted a few big flowers at the top of my lilac tree last Spring. And although it didn’t have many, I could smell the fragrant flowers in that area of the yard. I don’t know if I should just buy a new bush and give up on the old one, or try to work with what I have.

Lavender, white, pink, purple and blue are the colors to be found among lilac varieties. President Lincoln is one of the popular blue flowering plants.

Bloomstruck is the New Purple Hydrangea For 2014

purple hydrangea flowers
Bloomstruck is Purple

There is a new Endless Summer hydrangea variety and it’s purple, or violet.  It’s called Bloomstruck. I’ve added a link to the name so you can see a picture of the actual plant. My photo here is of a blue bloom which I turned purple in my graphic program. But it looks similar to how the Bloomstruck variety may appear.

Endless Summer is a popular type of hydrangea to grow as it blooms profusely. It’s small enough in size to put the plant into a pot, or find a good space in the yard to plant hydrangeas to add lots of beautiful color. For most people the Endless Summer plant means blue flowers. I have a bush that is only two years old and it has amazingly pretty blue flowers in summer. I also have the Blushing Bride variety which is white. But these macrophylla plants have flower colors that will change according to the type of soil – it’s pH- used to grow them. And that includes this new Bloomstruck variety. It is shown as violet / purple, but the site also says that the flower color could be “rose-pink” or “blue”.

I don’t think I will be adding this one to my yard as I have run out of places to put perennials and I have enough hydrangeas at the moment. If you decide to try this one out I’d love to hear how you like it.

Hydrangeas at The End of Summer

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End of Summer Pinky Winky

It’s hard to believe that it is the end of summer now. I recently took some photos of the flowers remaining in bloom in the yard, and the Pinky Winky is one of the hydrangeas that still looks good.

Although the many deer that frequent my yard come to eat hydrangea buds and leaves, my Pinky Winky shrub still has flowers. They started white then began to show some light pink, and ended up dark pink with some white at the top. Some of the flowers are totally pink.

I think I will try to shape my hydrangeas better before they start blooming next year. This one could end up being a tall tree with the flowers standing upright out of the reach of deer maybe. Pruning will be an experiment, and hopefully I won’t mess up the plant so it won’t bloom. This year I let all my hydrangeas grow “wild” in any way they chose. It’s only their second year in my yard, so I didn’t want to mess with them too much. The Limelight plants are really long and droopy, but have loads of very pretty flowers. Those would do better if they were trimmed for next spring.