In my Mom's yard, she has a beautiful, vibrant hydrangea bush. Every summer, this bush bursts forth with the most luscious purple blooms you have ever seen, and then holds onto this purple crown well into the fall.
Mom moves on Monday. Over Labor Day weekend, we were at her house, pulling items for the dump, and receiving a sofa for our house. One last thing that I did before we left for the day on Saturday was to cut some branches off of her hydrangea, to see if I could root them.
These are the branches that I cut. They don't look very good, do they? When Mom was getting the house ready to sell, she had a landscape crew come through and mulch everything. I'm convinced that the hydrangea was a victim of the mulch. Surrounded by a sea of dark black mulch, I think that the leaves were burned with the heat from the new mulch, and they had started to droop.
Most of the leaves on my cuttings looked like this when it came home. Hard to believe, but they were the healthiest branches on the bush. I stuck all of the cuttings into a jar of water and hoped for the best.
It's been a 7th grade science experiment in here, that we have been watching with some fascination. This leaf was just as curled up and dried as the one next to it. Over the course of the day yesterday, I watched a tiny, small band of healthy green spread through the leaf. Look at the leaf around the stem in the center! I took this picture early this morning, and this is the spread of water through the leaf.
Now, to hope that the roots magically grow!
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