Madonna: Hydrangea Hater.

Discussion in 'Plants: In the News' started by togata57, Sep 12, 2011.

  1. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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  2. Lysichiton

    Lysichiton Active Member

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    Good! At last something I can agree on with the "Material Girl". I get tired of gushy flower-lovers embracing every floral form the encounter. There are some garden plants & flowers that I do NOT like & I get dissed when I mention this fact.

    Public declaration....personally I dislike the following garden plants & try to avoid having them on my property:

    Hydrangeas of the traditional kind with sit-up-and-beg flower clusters that remind me of pink or blue poodles (let's hear it for Madonna!).
    Laurels (Prunus laurocerasus & P. lusitanica) remind me of the worst gloomy, repressive excesses of the 19th century Victorian/Protestant era.
    English Ivy. See above.
    Aucuba japonica. The leaves remind me of diseased lung tissue & it is so boorriing.
    Snowball viburnum. The ultimate 1950s plant that sometimes gets pruned to look like a lollipop, I suspect by women in pink bathrobes & mules.
    Junipers. Prickly things that smell like cat-pee, are hateful to prune, are always too big for where they are planted & bits die in the ugliest way possible.

    ...there, confession is good for the soul.
     
  3. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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    Tell us how you really feel, Lysichiton!

    Well, personally, I LIKE hydrangeas---but I do agree with your juniper and laurel opinions. (The latter are always bad news in British detective fiction.)

    I just cannot stand poinsettias. After a brief usefulness as a holiday decoration, these plants invariably get leggy and ugly, whilst clinging annoyingly to life. And they have that toxic Euphorbia sap thing happening, too. Only way to get them back to anything resembling a presentable condition is to strictly observe the 12-hours-light-twelve-hours-dark system...and I will tell you, mes amis, it is NOT WORTH IT!

    And people just WILL give them to me. I guess I will have to emulate Madonna in the video---fling the thing down and yell: 'I like ORCHIDS!!!'
     
  4. Ron B

    Ron B Paragon of Plants 10 Years

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    Certain junipers smell like pee, not all of them. And there are a lot of dwarf forms on the market.
     
  5. Lysichiton

    Lysichiton Active Member

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    Ron B, You are looking for logic in an emotional response. I don't like junipers. Sorry.
     
  6. Ron B

    Ron B Paragon of Plants 10 Years

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    My point was made for the same reason you posted

    >Hydrangeas of the traditional kind with sit-up-and-beg flower clusters<

    There's hydrangeas, and then there's hydrangeas. She was handed an example of a big mop-head type.
     
  7. Lysichiton

    Lysichiton Active Member

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    OK, point taken. As usual Ron B, you make me think.

    BTW there are some Hydrangeas I like (e.g. Aspera), but I don't like Junipers.
     
  8. Ron B

    Ron B Paragon of Plants 10 Years

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    If you look out the window and see junipers creeping toward your house, run out the back door!
     
  9. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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    A stealthy approach heralded by stench.

    Advise snatching up the nearest flamethrower on the way out.
     
  10. Debby

    Debby Active Member 10 Years

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    In her book Onward and Upward in the Garden, Katharine White writes of her disdain for flowers hybridized to look nothing like the species. I agree with her! Daffodils, echinacea, and hellebores have been tinkered with a little too much as far as I'm concerned.
     
  11. Lysichiton

    Lysichiton Active Member

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    Don't get me going. Doubling, overdoubling & colour selection to conform to the most garish shades, make most annuals of different genera look the same as well. I don't even go down those aisles in the garden centre anymore - it's bad for my blood pressure...Oops. I better go & do some chant some mantras to calm down.
     
  12. Sundrop

    Sundrop Well-Known Member

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    It could be very interesting to hear what do you like the most, people. I am always looking for new ideas for my garden.
     
  13. Lysichiton

    Lysichiton Active Member

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    ...Uh oh. A timely reminder. I love my veggie garden (not a GMO or F1 hybrid in sight BTW). I love a great tangle of Rosa glauca, Honeysuckle, Fuschia & Clethra we put together by accident & design in a corner of our yard. I love lots of shrubs, many of them species plants or fairly unmodified varieties. I love really smelly, enormous oriental Lilies that my wife has found over the years....see, I can go on & on & on :)
     
  14. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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    I'm with you, Lysichiton. One of my favorite childhood memories is visiting the 'herbaceous border' of an elderly friend of the family out in southern Illinois. Delphiniums, hollyhocks, Rose-of-Sharon, cosmos, snapdragons, ox-eye daisies, wild roses. Beautiful. (I think that she had hydrangeas, too.)

    Lately I am becoming irked at the profligate display of orchids seemingly everywhere. Walk in to my local grocery store and am confronted by a wall of phal clones. Now, orchids are a passion of mine...but I dislike this huge mass-production, selling hundreds of identical phalaenopsis like loaves of bread. Makes an impressive display, but what percentage of these plants will be tossed out after they finish flowering? ---A recent trend is bright blue-flowered phals. Artificially colored. What a gimmick. Tags on these do say, in very tiny print, that new flowers will be white. Tags also say to water with 3 ice cubes a week. I will dismount my soapbox before I launch into a lecture on how absolutely WRONG this instruction is!!! My objection to all the above is the attempt to make living plants into furniture, disregarding their needs and attributes. Insulting to the plants, and to people as well, all in the name of big greenhouses looking to make a fast buck.

    Call me old-fashioned! I don't mind.
     
  15. Ron B

    Ron B Paragon of Plants 10 Years

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    Moth orchids are one type the average purchaser might actually be able to keep alive and even get to bloom again under ordinary indoor conditions.
     
  16. togata57

    togata57 Generous Contributor 10 Years

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    Agreed. Such conditions do not include frozen roots.
     

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