When some plants bloom, the best you can do is smile with thin enthusiasm, like a mother faced with displaying yet another macaroni artwork from her darling toddler.
It's usually too rough a Winter for my black-stemmed hydrangea to carry the stem tips through until the next Spring.  But this past Winter was so mild, and I was so busy this Spring that I forgot to cut the clump to the ground, that my dear bush was finally able (ugh, grimace) delighted me with this July floral display.
Click, if you dare, for the full measure of despair: Flowers so pale, so anemic, that who can tell if they're pink or blue? Either way, their delicate indecision is a horrible neighbor to the delicate in-your-face yellow foliage of Spirea 'Ogon' to the upper left.  (Just avert your eyes from the semi-scorched foliage at the immediate left.  Thank you, last week's 100-degree oven.)
Life is one lesson after another. Fine. Hydrangea macrophylla 'Nigra' is the mop-head hydrangea to grow when you absolutely positively do not want any mop-heads.
No flowers, ever.
Cut the entire clump to the ground each Spring. It only takes five minutes. Find the time.
Then you'll have soaring new canes with large leaves—they don't name this species "macrophylla" for nothing—that look marvelous next to the yellow needlyness of ogon spirea. And that are paired right up stems that are coal-black. Which also look marvelous next to ogon spirea.

I always thought that this delicate-looking, densely-growing, gold-leaved hedging plant wasn't hardy in New England, but then I saw it at a friend's garden in Stonington, even farther away from the mild ocean influences then I am.  Yes, it gets a bit of dieback each Winter, but it bounces right back in Spring. And she doesn't protect it at all either.


So, OK. I'm trying it in my sheltered Zone 7 Wannabe garden on the South of the house. Tall hedges to the East and West and South muffle the Winter wind, and the South exposure captures the height of the Summer sun and heat.  And one of my more tender Southern magnolias—Edith Bogue—is already thriving here.

So if I'm going to have this delicate Zone 7 beauty here in Hopkinton, the South Garden is the spot.


Hooray: The Stonington owner just gave me a branch that had rooted out in the soil all on its own. So it's in, and the experiment—Is it hardy here too, not just 8 miles West?—has begun.