📷 Hydrangea, Blue — Himalayan Foothills, India · 09 Sept 2026
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Hydrangea, Blue
Himalayan Foothills, India · nature
A dense head of blue hydrangea fills the frame, each four-petalled floret a small clean cross. The blue is somewhere between sky and ink.
Hydrangea blue is one of those colours that exists in flowers because of soil chemistry: the same plant will produce pink heads in alkaline soil and blue heads in acidic soil, and the blue is more saturated the lower the pH. In the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, where the soil is leached and slightly acidic, hydrangeas reliably bloom blue, and gardens in places like Coorg and Munnar are known for them.
This head was the size of a small football, dense enough to fill the frame at close range. Each individual flower is a four-petalled cross, the petals slightly waxy, the cross overlapping its neighbours in a kind of low-relief mosaic. A few small pale-green buds at the edges had not yet opened. I shot tight, with depth of field thin enough to keep the bottom of the cluster softening into the leaves. Blue hydrangea is a flower that the camera tends to oversaturate; the trick is to expose for the highlights and let the centre of the cluster hold most of the colour.