Would you join me this month to celebrate my love affair with the natural world? During May, I’m devoting most of my social media posts and all of my stories here to exploring my lifelong connection and love of the natural world, sharing the lessons of the mountains, the forest, the sea and the garden.

Into the garden we go…

As I tend the hydrangea shrubs in my shade garden, I can almost hear the music of the buoy bells on the Kennebec River near its meeting with the Atlantic on the coast of Maine. Those clanging bells guide boaters heading out to sea or back home.

Of course, it’s impossible to hear the buoy bells from my patch of ground here in a fertile valley of central Pennsylvania. Nor can I actually hear the foghorn bellowing in the distance from my first garden decades ago, when the thick and blinding fog rolled in off the ocean. Or, for that matter, announcements over the loudspeaker at the massive shipyard with the giant red and white cranes perched over the river. That was our third garden.

These tough hydrangea plants that bloom in hundreds of delicate ivory petals clustered into loose balls first hooked me on growing flowers. They have been with me in every garden I have loved, tended and left behind: three along the Kennebec in Maine, and two here among the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania, where I now hear the clattering hooves of horses pulling Amish buggies and church bells playing melodies of hymns. I weed and hum along to my favorites.

These hydrangea connect and remind me of my most cherished people and places. And in that way, they represent the power and delight of a garden to me: A collaboration of soul and careful tending upon a unique patch of earth. A powerful connection to communities of people and the natural world that includes us all and that I find as necessary as oxygen.

Blush Blooms, Dresses & Bouquets

They remind me of the blush blooms of the hydrangea in my mother’s garden, and of the pink earrings Karen wore with a deep pink silk dress as the matron of honor for my first wedding beside the ocean. She is among a tiny number of best friends, sisters-of-choice. Another, Elizabeth, and I carried hydrangea in our bouquets for my wedding to my husband and love of my life. Elizabeth — my best woman who stood for all of the strong and beautiful women I am lucky to call friends — created my wedding band of four hydrangea leaves in sterling silver.

The day before the August wedding, Elizabeth and I cut buckets full of hydrangea blooms from her garden for my mom to arrange for the steps of the stone house where we had our ceremony and for all of the tables. Hydrangea overflowed my car, and I sailed home on their sweet scent.

In the days after our wedding, I was so high from the event and celebration — so in love, still so in love — and surrounded by loads of those gorgeous hydrangea blossoms, I decided these gardens at our house beside the church could overflow with the hydrangea that would be in full bloom each summer for our anniversary.

“Hydrangea heaven” I call it. I’m up to seven different varieties, and counting.

Blooming on New Wood — or Old?

Truth be told, I rarely focus on the hydrangea shrubs that are offspring of my first hydrangea in my first garden. Tucked into the ground as tiny offshoots from a shrub left behind in a quaint town full of Victorian houses and over the mountain ridge, I let them be for years here, growing bigger each season.

Busy with tending family and putting down new roots of my own, I forgot all about them.

Then — realizing they had not bloomed in awhile, I pruned the tips of them one fall and they bloomed in creamy white blossoms the next summer. They grew into five lush shrubs overflowing their spot. I moved one last fall and am waiting until after a good, soaking rain to move another. On this chilly, late May morning, I just pruned them. Hope I get away with it.

Some hydrangeas bloom on new wood and some on old wood, depending on the variety.

My oakleaf hydrangeas — with cone-shaped blooms and leaves that turn crimson in the fall — bloom on “old” wood, meaning it’s last season’s growth. So I can prune them in the summer after they bloom, or not at all. Two of my three “oakies” are already full of buds. (That third one is new this year.)

A garden bouquet of late August blooms. The pale and deep pink blooms are oakleaf hydrangea. The green are the buds of sedum, Autumn Joy, and the ivory is a smooth hydrangea.

My “mophead,” classic or “smooth” hydrangeas — Hydrangea arborescens — must be pruned in the fall or early spring because they bloom on new wood, fresh green stems, less than a year old.

First the Compost, then Plants and Furniture

That first garden in earshot of the buoy bells on the Kennebec was at a rented, mahogany-stained cape house overlooking green trees stretching to the horizon. A shift in the shades of green foliage marked the location of the wide river below, but we could not see the Kennebec. Only the trees.

When I moved to an in-law apartment at the end of a Greek Revival house — where I could see the river from my bedroom — that hydrangea moved with me. After the compost pile and before I moved any furniture, as I recall.

Two years after moving to Pennsylvania, I finally let go of the house in Maine, and spent a sum several times the cost of a new plant to retrieve that hydrangea and drive it back to Central Pennsylvania. That’s OK, a bit of soil from those patches of earth I poured my heart into clings to its roots.

The hydrangea collection at the Norfolk Botanical Garden includes 900 plants, representing 20 different species an 200 different cultivars.

So, seven varieties is … well, just a pretty good start. I must remember to tell my husband about the hydrangea collection at the Norfolk Botanical Garden.

If I could only pick one plant, it’s that first hydrangea. One plant I’d pick to take into the afterlife. One plant that connects me to all the gardens, to my best friends who have become sisters, to the day I married my husband and stepsons …

It’s that first hydrangea. When I fell in love with it, I fell in love with gardening and our connection has only growth richer and stronger over time.

(But — my idea of heaven is that there are no limits on hydrangeas. No limits on good friends, cherished loves and gardens. Just saying.)

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