Popcorn hydrangea goes crazy

My popcorn hydrangea ‘Ayesha’ is starting to show a range of flower shapes

It’s six years now since I first posted about my popcorn hydrangea ‘Ayesha’, but this summer, with all the rain, it has grown huge and vigorous. It has also started to diversify! Usually the flowers remind me of lilac but now the sepals are starting to appear flat as in many other hydrangeas.

I thought the proper word for it was “recidivism”, which I thought also applied to variegated leaves turning back to plain green, but now I can find no reference to this word botanically, only in the sense of a prisoner returning to a life of crime or a medical condition relapsing.

Whatever the word for it, I think this bush may be reverting to its roots. Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Ayesha’ is probably a “sport” of Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Sir Joseph Banks’, possibly called Hydrangea maritima when Banks brought it back from China to England in 1789. A “sport” is a shoot that shows different leaf shape or colour, flowers or branch structure from the rest of the shrub. New plants can be grown from cuttings of this unusual material.

These are the ‘Ayesha’ flowers I expect to see – quite pink as we generally have neutral or slightly alkaline clay soil here

These flowers are more open

These flowers are more purple

A closer look

Sometimes the flowers fade to pale green

A closer look

The flowers also start off green

In some parts of the plant the blooms are more blue than pink, showing a variation in acidity – I blame all the bird droppings that must surely reach the soil

A mixed bunch of flower heads growing alongside each other

This is the most extreme variation I have seen from the usual popcorn type

And by chance it looks just like the ancestral ‘Sir Joseph Banks’…

This is Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Sir Joseph Banks’ – an image from the www.plantenkwekerijen.be website

I will be cutting back the bush before next spring, so it will be interesting to see if the same variations happen next year.