Hydrangea

If you ask me my least favorite color, I'm likely to say green, but that can't be true: my favorite flower in bloom asserts green -- blush green like pistachio ice cream or lime sorbet with cream or the shadows in a baby's fat thigh folds.


Throughout town, snowball or torn-and-ruffled-paper-globe flowers dangle from hydrangea (water vessel, literally, from Greek) limbs like so many holiday ornaments shouting "Spring!"

So many, so liberal, so cheerful, so green -- even the deer seem to be leaving them alone, happily for me and my ravenous visual appetite.

Red, Orange, Yellow: Bronze

Over my long career as an English teacher, I have grown tired of reading student poems about fall colors. How can anyone describe the brilliance of the dying leaf? The elegance of the limp leaf? The balletic limbs? The play of light on age-spotted plants? I can't do it. I can only use my camera to capture the colors blooming in my Virginia sweetspire and deer-damaged oakleaf hydrangea.