Hydrageæ 2026

This has been a pretty good year for the Weekend Hydrangea Team. Let’s check in on them.

Florilegium Hydrangeæ

This has been a pretty good year for the hydrangeas. Not as good as 2024 (see midsummer and later summer). But still, pretty good.

First, it must be mentioned that the Weekend Host of Hostas put in a pretty good showing this year. They are shown here, in front of and throughout the Weekend Editrix’s garden, with their delicate purple flowers poking up on very long thin shoots, somewhere between 1.0 - 1.5 meters above the ground.

I have a theory that this stem evolved to discourage squirrels and rabbits from eating the flowers, which they apparently find quite tasty. In years past, I have seen both species nibbling hungrily on them, by going into the interior of the plant, pushing the stem down, and walking out upon it to get the goodies. But not this year? I can’t say exactly why, but suspect that the litter of coyote pups and enthusiastic hunting by their parents may have exerted some evolutionary pressure on the Squirrel Squad and the Lapin Cabal.

However, the gold medeal in the Château Weekend Flora Olympics must again go to Team Hydrangea.

Here they are shown in 2 views:

• At the top, the team is in mid-summer splendor in their blue uniforms. The team mascot, on the right, is in whites, but also in full flower.
• At the bottom, most of the blues are gone now, just one remaining visible in the background. However, we see that the team mascot is now resplendent in the post-season fall red uniform.

The blues on the left and the red on the right invite political interpretation, but the fact that the political red in the US is ugly while the red hydrangea is beautiful makes that comparison somewhat inept.

The Weekend Conclusion

We gratefully acknowledge help in preparing this blog post from the Assistant Weekend Publisher, shown here in the midst of offering valuable editorial assistance. I didn’t know cats could take selfies. (No idea why the colors look washed out here; they look great in the preview application.)

Also: there has been infrequent blogging this month, and that will likely continue to be the case for a while. Upgrading my OS has trashed my Ruby installation, and the Jekyll software I use for blogging at GitHub depends on that. I’ve hacked around it a bit, but now I apparently have 3 separate Ruby installations of various vintages, the gem repositories are all over the place, and the blog build is throwing inscrutable error messages about things I don’t understand and don’t want to understand. I just want to write, not become a Ruby software engineer or site administrator!

Also, they broke my spelling corrector; beware of Spoonerisms.

So I beg your pardon while I wrestle with snakes.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est!)

(Et ceterum censeo, index Epsteiniani divulganda est!)

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Notes & References

Nope.