Author’s Note: Hydrangeas captures and expands a moment I experienced early in the pandemic. The catastrophic aspects of the virus, our social, political climate, the confinement, were all overwhelming. Looking out the window at the hydrangeas set me off on a journey offering perspective on human and botanical vulnerabilities and virtues — universal, bobbling, green.
Hydrangeas
THE HYDRANGEAS, cream, lime-tinged, bob outside the window. I’m lying on the living room couch, under the weather on an overcast day. The room is dim, the hydrangeas glow.
The flowers form a bouquet with a gawky tree and the butter-yellow house across the street. A few weeks ago, you’d have seen a massive oak there, too, but the neighbors said it was dead or dying and then it was gone.
What kind of hydrangeas? According to Google, they’re panicles. According to my dictionary, panicles are loose, diversely branching flower clusters. They are a type of racemose inflorescences, racemose referring to boat-shaped nectar cups and inflorescence to the arrangement and distribution of the flowers on an axis.
Whatever their name or pedigree, they’re no beauties. Cone-headed, swaying awkwardly on their long stems, they look goofy. If I were a botanist, I’d call them racemose mullet heads.
Jerking toward and away from each other, these hydrangeas, framed by the curtains, remind me of Punch and Judy puppets but without the high-pitched bickering. And they’re slower—more like marionettes.
Marionettes can mimic us imperfectly and then, in a single gesture, capture us. I don’t know if I’m remembering or imagining a maiden with bright yellow braids and a black-and-white pinafore, blushing, and dipping her chin, gravity too slowly closing her carved eyelids. And a bearded, doddering, old man raising his trembling hands and tipping his head heavenward. I know I sighed, awed, string-pulled this way.
They have odd rhythms, marionettes, and hydrangeas. Babies, often, too. I imagine one lying on its back in a crib, fists squeezing, feet kicking, totally besotted by the purest prospect—the world.
I glide my finger down the dictionary page—panic, panic grass, panicked, panicle. Looking it up on YouTube, leads me to a video of millet, the most commonly cited panicle. I watch a field of it, green arms raised, hailing the wind, and pleading with it, with Pan. Of course, these words must be related, they must be spawn of the all-encompassing, part-goat, part-man, pipe-playing shepherd-god Pan whose name itself is a propulsive breath of a word.
Sounds heard by night on mountains and in valleys were attributed to Pan, and
hence he was reputed to be the cause of any sudden and groundless fear.
But while pandemic derives from Pan, panicle does not. It derives from the Latin panicula, literally meaning “thread wound on a bobbin.”
I like these cross-pollinated images with their distant drama and Gothic, verdant dread. I like them much better than the myriad scenes of ever-closer catastrophe that come to mind again and again these days.
I have redefined panicle, but I realize I’ve overlooked hydrangea, a mashup of the Greek hydra, water, and the Latin angeion, vessel. Hydrangeas were originally (and still often are) called Hortensia.
Philibert Commerson, the eighteenth-century French botanist, named them after Nicole Hortense Lepaute, his secret lover, so the speculation goes.
Lepaute was a clockmaker, astronomer, and mathematician. She helped predict the return of Halley’s Comet. She adopted her nephew and trained him in science. She nursed her dying husband in his last year, even as she went blind.
The scope and the frailty of such a life, of life, in just these few facts, quickens. I stare at the wind-blown forms through the glass, breathing.
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Elly Meeks’ essays, articles and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and JSTOR Daily, among others. She works in nonprofits in the areas of community arts, culture and mental health and lives in Northern New Jersey. Website: https://www.efsmeeks.com
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