Hydrangea Favorites



‘Wayne’s White’ with ‘Zebra’ hydrangea,
creeping jenny ‘Aurea’ and ‘August Frost’ hosta

This seems to be a good year in my garden for hydrangeas, probably due in large measure to the prudent pruning my garden helper Melissa Hoss did earlier in the year. I added a few new hydrangeas to the garden—Pistachio, Shooting Star and Golden Crane®—but there are two that are perennial favorites and they are unapologetically photogenic. 

Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Wayne’s White’ opens a clear white then fades to the most delicate shade of pink imaginable. It is classified as a lacecap but the huge florets cover the cap so that you hardly see any of the fertile flowers. Individual blooms can be two inches in diameter and the cap in the photo measures about nine inches across. I’ve only see it offered by Hydrangeas Plus®, which is where I got mine a few years ago. Irresistible!

Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Glowing Embers’ (also known as ‘Alpengluhen’) also can be relied on to provide a show. Many descriptions describe the flower color as red; I would say mine are magenta. Regardless, they offer reliable blooms and the foliage is a nice deep green. It’s a modest sized hydrangea (4 ft. x 4 ft.) so it is easy to make room in a “morning sun” location for it, even when space is at a premium.

In the fall, I’ll probably be saying my favorite hydrangea is a quercifolia (oakleaf) or paniculata, but for now, the macrophyllas are the beauty queens.