Hydrangea colour

[Nimrod103]

I'm familiar with using sequestrene to get blue hydrangea flowers on my only mildly acidic soil.

But if I want pink hydrangeas, should I add lime?

Left on their own, most of my hydrangeas flower with a sort of variable pinkish to bluish hue, neither being all that strong. However, I have just picked up in a sale, a strongly pink red hydrangea. Will it naturally keep that colour, or will I have to put some lime around it?

[Breelander]

I'm familiar with using sequestrene to get blue hydrangea flowers on my only mildly acidic soil.

But if I want pink hydrangeas, should I add lime?

Left on their own, most of my hydrangeas flower with a sort of variable pinkish to bluish hue, neither being all that strong. However, I have just picked up in a sale, a strongly pink red hydrangea. Will it naturally keep that colour, or will I have to put some lime around it?

Is it a hydrangea macrophylla? If so then it will change colour with the pH of the soil. Yes, lime should do it....

To change a plant from blue to pink is trickier. You will need to raise the pH by adding dolomitic lime...

https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/g ... ydrangeas/

[Nimrod103]

Thanks. I have pink macrophylla, which I would like to stay pink. So I guess I will add eggshells when I come to plant it out.

I also have a number of well established lacecaps, which, as I described, in my vaguely neutral/slightly acid soil tend to have a colour which wavers between vaguely blue and vaguely pink, even on the same plant.

Reading in the press I note a number of articles about how hydrangeas are back in fashion, having been out of fashion for a number of years. We went to Brittany last summer on holiday, and I noted how so many of the houses there (many of them French holiday homes) had hydrangeas in the shadier areas, and Agapanthus in the more open sunnier areas. Very effective it was too, even though many gardens had just these two plants.

[todthedog]

We used to live in Finisterre hydrangeas are the national flower and are everywhere.

[Dod101]

All of this reminds me of the litmus test in my chemistry classes at school many years ago. I use garden lime for my lavender because I am on a somewhat acidic soil. Lime is also used quite liberally for some vegetables. I am no longer growing any so have forgotten which, I think brassicas?

Dod

[Breelander]

All of this reminds me of the litmus test in my chemistry classes at school many years ago...

Except that hydrangea is red for alkali, blue for acid - the opposite of litmus...

...Lime is also used quite liberally for some vegetables. I am no longer growing any so have forgotten which, I think brassicas?

Yes. Helps control club root infection.

[Dod101]

All of this reminds me of the litmus test in my chemistry classes at school many years ago...

Except that hydrangea is red for alkali, blue for acid - the opposite of litmus...

...Lime is also used quite liberally for some vegetables. I am no longer growing any so have forgotten which, I think brassicas?

Yes. Helps control club root infection.

I had forgotten the colours for litmus but I was aware that acidic soil produces blue hydrangeas as I live in Scotland and indeed have some hydrangeas in my garden.

Some gardeners swear that lime helps cropping as well, but I do not know.

Dod