Tips for Blue/Pink Hydrangeas

Did you know you can dye your hydrangeas blue (or pink ... or orange)!? Useful tips on drying, growing and coloring hydrangeas from the Endless Summer hydrangea web site.

Well, I was perusing the Endless Summer hydrangea web site (yes, this well hyped plant has its very own web site!) and came across some interesting tips for drying the blooms -- plus tips on growing them. Now even if you don't have an Endless Summer hydrangea, you might find the tips helpful for the hydrangea you do have as long as it is a bigleafed H. macrophylla or H. serrata variety with pink or blue blooms.

In the old days, we just hung the flowers upside down in a dark, dry place with good air circulation and that worked well enough, and the more forgetful among us left them to dry in the vase. Both methods work fine but the flower color is lost.

Then came the hints for using silica gel for drying the blooms. This is a powder not a gel and is really expensive in quantity (although reusable) but that is neither here nor there.

Next is the idea of using (clean) kitty litter -- which is far less expensive than silica gel because you need a pretty fair quantity of the material to completely cover those big blooms. (The site recommends using a fine textured NON clumping kitty litter.)

Now comes the interesting part. They suggest coloring the dried flowers with dye. You can use fabric dye to enhance the pink or the blue on your dried hydrangea flowers.

You could make them any color you can think of. Almost scary to imagine mutant colored hydrangea blooms around the world, but go ahead and try it. If you do, please let me know if it works. Can you tie dye them? Can you dye them while still on the plant? I suspect it can be a messy process because they mention something about using lots of newspaper to catch the drips. That hint, to me with all my thumbs and born messy, says this is definitely an outside project!!

And the best take home nugget on the entire care page: apparently many well meaning folks have killed their hydrangeas by using too much aluminum sulfate to acidify the soil to try to make the flowers bluer. So, don't be using that stuff to turn your hydrangeas blue -- used in quantity it is toxic!!! (A possible exception would be if you live in an area where the soil is actually deficient in aluminum. Ask your county extension or soil lab!)

There are other better ways to help enhance the blue color of your hydrangeas and the Endless Summer-hydrangea growing tips page tells you about them.

There is also a discussion thread with many links to detailed hydrangea care information.

Enjoy those hydrangeas!