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I need to take a photo of my climbing hydrangea, and my sisters; mine was slow to get going, and suddenly last year it was
everywhere on the north wall of my house. When I pulled it off the house and trellised it I ended up with a four- part trellis, including one eight-foot chunk of livestock panel, one three-foot by four and a half foot chunk ditto, and two bits of decorative trellising I got cheap at Tuesday Morning, each with a rondel of glass in a frame at the top, one set on the porch rail and the other on the top of the dog fence (Deirdre: between my bedroom window and the big mock-orange). I finally got to the Iron Rooster yesterday and bought a second wrought iron bracket to support the final corner of the big piece of livestock panel; I had a single nice hook from the blacksmithery at Puyallup Fair and the bottom of the trellis has eight inches of galvanized steel every six inches pushed into the ground, but I prefer having all
four corners stabilized.
For those has not seen one, this is a Climbing Hydrangea in bud:
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a41/Julia_here/DSC_0402-2.jpg. They get
huge when they're happy; I remember a wall on the Richmond to London rail route which was thirty feet tall and a kilometer long, covered with climbing hydrangea in bloom; there also used to be a huge one out by Bruceport, but then there also used to be a Dr. van Fleet rose on the south side of 101 just past Cosmopolis that climbed 60 feet up into a cedar tree; it was cut down and replaced by a Grays Harbor PUD substation.
My sister gave me a piece of climbing hydrangea (the true one, not the Schizophragma hydrangeoides), several years ago. I'm still waiting for it to take off. Maybe this year.
Mine is
Hydrangea peteolaris, also; I got it from Forest Farmat the same time as
Hydrangea quercifolia, a plant of each apiece for me and Mom; they did a lot better, a lot faster, at her house in the rocky soils than here in my sand.