I woke up one day last week, instantly convinced that what the garden really needed was another two hydrangeas. White ones. As epiphanies go, this one wasn’t totally out of the blue. There’d been a moment the previous evening when, closing the gate, I’d looked back towards Shed #1 and seen in my mind’s eye, a large, squat green pebble of a shrub, dotted all about with white globes and mirrored, on the other side of the small path and just in front of the trellis, in an area yet to be deliberately planted and buried under the remnants of the ash tree saplings I grubbed out over winter for the new shed base, by something very similar.1 I toyed briefly with floral colour – lime green, pink, blue or, in the way that only a hydrangea pulls off with elan, a mixture of all three, but found myself in agreement with my initial belief that white was the way to go.
Dusk was falling heavily over the garden, but through the deep and darkling shade white flowers had marked my way back along the path, lambent in the gloaming and lit, as white flowers often are on a summer night, but some kind of other-worldly, faerie light quite unlike any illumination you or I could conjure at the flick of a switch, or the striking of a match. You’re probably going to tell me that it’s the moon, and the way the petals are designed to reflect and magnify that gentler light, so as to present an attractive prospect for moths and other nocturnal pollinators; and of course, you’d be right. But there’s something about white flowers in the twilight that resists such sensible, but unsentimental explanations. What’s called for here is a touch of whimsy.
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