Hydrangeas’ Economic and Ecological Value by Ruth Paget
On our weekend marketing day where my family usually goes to Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Nob Hill for American and French food items, I saw huge pom-pom flowers for sale at Costco.
I used Google lens to identify the blue and pink pom-pom plants and saw that these were hydrangeas. I have given these plants to people as gifts, but forgot the name of the plants.
Now that I had the plant name, I looked up the plant characteristics on several sites and read that hydrangea flowers turn blue in acidic soil and pink in alkaline soil.
Hydrangeas came become very tall (up 8 feet) and grow in moist, well-drained soil and partial shade according to Google AI and Master Gardener Catherine Boeckmann at Almanac.com, who has written extensively on their care and topics like coloring flowers and growing them from cuttings. Her excellent article follows:
https://www.almanac.com/plant/hydrangeas#:~:text=Panicle%20hydrangeas%20(Hydrangea%20paniculata),Lacecap%20hydrangea
Knowing how to grow hydrangeas from cuttings can be a part-time or gig business, if you have a space to grow the flowers and a customer base. Nurseries like Grigg’s, Bokay, or Earthbound, hardware stores like Lowe’s, Costco, CVS, or other places where you see flowers sold could probably tell you how to grow sellable plants and where to get them distributed.
Hydrangeas have an economic value beyond plant sales. The three varieties described in hydrangea.com below attract bees, butterflies, and other pollinators, which are important for honey production and agricultural plant fertilization for crops, orchards, and vineyards:
https://hydrangea.com/blogs/growing-tips/3-hydrangeas-for-pollinators#:~:text=Oakleaf%20hydrangea%20(Hydrangea%20quercifolia)%20is%20a%20shrub,exposing%20seeds%20for%20songbirds%2C%20cardinals%2C%20and%20sparrows.
Hydrangeas provide food for bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, which are all present in Monterey County California where I saw these beautiful pom-pom hydrangea plants. Hydrangeas help keep places like the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, California thriving (open October to March during butterfly migration to Latin America.)
Raising flowers like hydrangeas helps create a gardening community that supports nursery sales like potting soil, fertilizer, containers, and tools as well which is good for the economy, especially in California where we have year-round sunshine making it easy to grow plants. These items might be suitable for delivery work as well.
For young couples or young families, taking care of a beautiful hydrangea can be part of a daily connection to nature that supports bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and the local economy through eco-tourism, agriculture, and vineyards.
Hydrangeas have a tangible health benefit in proving antioxidants which remove free radicals from the body that may cause cancer. Honey is sweet, so you do have to limit intake to not gain weight.
The photo below from Getty Images shows a hydrangea in all its pom-pom glory:
https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/hydrangea
Happy Gardening!
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France and developer of the Novgorod and Bento War Games
