"A summertime visit to the Botanical Garden is a singular pleasure" - so begins Douglas Justice's July in the Garden 2024 - UBC Botanical Garden blog. It's such a riot of colour out there, I'm not sure how Douglas managed to confine himself to summer-blooming rhododendrons and hydrangeas, and mostly not the showy hydrangea family plants at that. Of the two summer-blooming rhododendrons mentioned in the blog, it's already late for Rhododendron glanduliferum. I photographed these on June 30. I didn't see any flowers today, July 11 Andy Hill helped me find a few plants, and he mentioned that the R. auriculatum are not flowering yet, but he put us onto the very huge Rhododendron decorum subsp. diaprepes 'Gargantua', which has a few flowers remaining. I think I have cut off half the tree in that first photo. I remembered exactly where to find Hydrangea bifida, walked right to the spot, and did not see them. Well, here are two groups Andy pointed out. The flowers are not really open yet, and the leaves are not all bilobed, and the ones that are bilobed are missing their leaf tips. The other group Andy described as a bit hidden from view - behind the boulder in the foreground and some Shibataea (bamboo) and Rodgersia and ferns and a few other plants. Actually, there's a very recognizable bilobed leaf just to the right of Andy's right arm. I have to see whether my friend has a better photo of some climbing hydrangea flowers, so I'll save those for another post. Here are a few garden vistas. The entrance plaza, with what used to be called Gaura - Oenothera lindheimeri 'Graceful White'. Filipendula purpurea 'Nana' along Upper Asian Way. The Physic Garden. The African section of the E. H. Lohbrunner Alpine Garden, where Berkheya purpurea is looking excellent. The Contemporary Garden, with Phlomis russeliana.
This deciduous Hydrangea hydrangeoides is on Upper Asian Way near Wharton Trail, I think the one that Douglas described as "truly impressive". Several of them were truly impressive. We were very surprised to see what looked like mushrooms but turned out to be flower buds growing on the evergreen Hydrangea integrifolia. We were both using phone cameras. Karen Munn's iPhone marginally won over my Android for the attempts to zoom in on the round buds and flowers, so the last two photos are hers. What surprised me so much about those buds was that I posted for ID the buds of Hydrangea aspera one year (and then figured it out a week later). I thought, then, that I had learned what hydrangea buds looked like. But these are very different from the ones above. I wish you could feel how soft and fuzzy are the new leaves on this plant.