Oak Leaf Hydrangeas

One day late last spring, I looked out the back door and noticed this big bushy plant with large clusters of white flowers on it—cone-shaped clusters, kind of like a crepe myrtle or a lilac bush.

There were two of them in the back yard. I’d never seen anything that looked quite like these before, so I asked my husband, Brian, who’d lived in the South for a good chunk of his life, if he knew what they were.

“They look like weeds,” he said.

“Nah….You really think they’re just weeds? The flowers are kind of pretty. They don’t smell, but they’re kinda nice.”

He was fairly certain: “Weeds.”

A couple of weeks later, when we were driving to church, I noticed some of these same plants in the front yard of one of the houses I’ve always admired as we whizzed on past. They didn’t look like weeds. They looked like they’d been put there on purpose, as part of the landscaping.

Before long, I was noticing them everywhere we went. I became convinced that they were not weeds, but rather actual flowering bushes that people wanted to have in their yards.

It took some doing—I had to really scour my Southern Living Garden Book (what a great resource!)—but I finally figured out what they are.

As you can plainly see from the title of this post, they are called oak leaf hydrangeas. Which makes perfect sense, since the leaves do look like oak leaves, and since the flowers do resemble those of standard (French) hydrangeas—we have some of those growing in our front yard, too, but it’ll be a while before those bloom.

One of the best things I’ve found about living in Florida is having the opportunity to discover and learn about new types of plants and flowers.

Yep, these may look a bit like weeds, but they’re rather pretty weeds, don’t you think?