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A demure but rather charming shrub that has been in the garden for about a decade. Introduced originally by Robert Fortune from Hong Kong in 1844 as Dichroa versicolor and later thought to be a hybrid between Hydrangea and Dichroa. I was given a plant and put it out in the garden where it has prospered and been untroubled by cold, despite warnings that it wasn't quite hardy. This picture shows it in bud, but when they open the flowers are a rich, pure blue and are produced throughout the year, with perhaps a short break in early spring. It has been a really good plant and a couple of newer selections have been raised and named. I think my plant is a Michael Haworth-Booth introduction , which has since been named 'Blue Sapphire' to distinguish it. The latest taxonomic treatments have sunk Dichroa into an enlarged Hydrangea so this has become Hydrangea x versicolor. The new revision of Hydrangea in Trees and Shrubs online says: "To say that this name covers all hybrids involving only Hydrangea macrophylla (Section Macrophyllae) and H. febrifuga (Section Dichroa), gives no hint of the depths of confusion, misunderstanding – both historical and current – and genuine, ongoing uncertainty surrounding these hybrids. At present, the name is applied to three distinct groups of plants, material introduced from Hong Kong, where it is cultivated and naturalized, hybrids which have arisen in Western cultivation through accidental and deliberate crosses, and (more contentiously) material collected in Thailand (Shaw 2014). Hong Kong plants provide the type. They were named (initially as Adamia versicolor) from a plant collected in a Hong Kong ravine by Robert Fortune in 1840 (Fortune in Anon. 1846). It flowered once in 1846 under glass in the Horticultural Society’s London garden, where Fortune was Superintendent of the hothouses, gained a reputation as tender and intractable (Lindley & Paxton 1853) and seems to have fallen from view, perhaps dying out. This plant was seen in Hong Kong with blue berries, but did not fruit in Britain. It appears to be well established in Hong Kong, both in cultivation and introduced to the wild, and always named Dichroa febrifuga there (Hunt 1981; Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden 2025) but it is unclear whether the hybrid originated there." |
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| 5th August 2014 | ||
