Hydrangeas were my wedding flower, which is the sort of thing you decide at twenty-something without giving it much thought and then find yourself living alongside for the next twenty years. They were blue then. I was firmly a blue hydrangea person for a long time — that particular impossible blue you can only get by fussing with the soil, which I found romantic at the time and now find like a lot of work. Somewhere in the last few years I’ve gone over to the limelights. They’re a paler, stranger green, they don’t ask me to adjust the chemistry of anything, and they bloom late here — August into September, right when the rest of the garden in North Carolina has thrown up its hands. I have come to have real respect for a plant that shows up at the end.
This year it nearly didn’t. We had almost no rain from June on, and the Little Lime in the front bed had a miserable summer. I’m telling you because the painting won’t (as paintings almost never do). I watered it the way you water something you’ve privately given up on — dutifully, at four in the afternoon, which is the wrong time and I knew it. The leaves went papery at the edges in early July and stayed that way. Half that shrub still looks like a mistake I made.
And then it made six flower heads. Not apologetic ones. Big, dense, that green that hasn’t decided whether it’s going to be cream or pink and won’t decide for another three weeks. I stood there with the hose running into the mulch and thought, you had this in you the whole time? And then I stood there a while longer, because I knew exactly what it had done. It had spent whatever it had left on the flowers.
That is a thing I understand in my body. Anyone who has raised children understands it — the years when there is nothing in the tank at all, and you make the birthday cake anyway, and you get up at eleven at night to sew the costume, and you find, from somewhere you cannot account for, the patience for one more question at bedtime. You give the people you love the beautiful thing and you keep the papery leaves to yourself.
So I cut four of the heads that afternoon. It felt less like harvesting than like accepting something I’d been offered. They went into the blue and white ginger jar on the kitchen table and then I set the little silver cup beside it. It does honest work there — the jar and the flowers make a tall mass on one side, and the cup is the small, low weight that keeps the whole thing from tipping out of the frame, the way a comma keeps a sentence from running off. But I’d be lying if I said that’s why it’s in the painting. It’s in the painting because I love painting silver. Silver has no color of its own; it only reports on the room, so a piece of it beside the blue and white jar turns partly blue and the side near the window has the warm white glow of southern-facing light.
It took four days altogether. The greens were the hard part; Little Lime is not one green but about nine, all having a slightly different conversation with the light. And what I keep seeing in the finished painting is not the drought or the leaves I left out of the frame. It’s just four flowers in a jar on a table, set out where somebody coming through the room would see them.
The rest of the heads are still out there, going pink now. I keep meaning to cut them and keep not doing it, on the theory that the plant has earned them.
No. 74 ∙ Little Lime & Silver
Oil on linen panel · 9 × 12 in. · 2026 · framed in a warm champagne silver beaded frame
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