Planting Invincibelle Sublime Hydrangeas, Visiting Gilded Age Gardens

Good morning friends! I hope you're having a wonderful day out there in your gardens. Well this week I traveled to Newport, Rhode Island to see some of the amazing Gilded Age mansions. Boy was I blown away with that Gilded Age architecture. But you know what caught my eye even more and made a true lasting impression? It was all of the fantastic hydrangea hedges that surrounded almost every single Gilded Age mansion. So what I want to do today is add even more hydrangeas into the garden. Now I have to tell you something. Proven Winners found out that we were doing Better Homes and Gardens and they decided to send out 62 new hydrangeas for the garden. So I've been planting lots of new hedges but today we're going to be adding just one hydrangea into the hydrangea room and that's my favorite smooth green hydrangea called Sublime. It grows about three and a half to five feet tall. Beautiful green blooms with a pink center. So I can't wait to get it into the hydrangea room and add even more of these gorgeous blooms to North Lawn. Before I grab my shovel I need to show you how the driveway garden is looking. All of my panicle hydrangeas are in bloom. They've started to turn that beautiful antique mauve color and all of the Millennium Alliums are in bloom all throughout this garden. I'm really happy with what we've accomplished over in this garden in four years time. I can still remember when we first moved into this house and this area was full of dead plum trees, rotting apple trees, and pussy willows that were falling over. Those first few years that I gardened on the property I just filled up this area with sunflowers after we cleared away those dead trees but over the years we've transitioned this garden into a slightly formal garden with some beautiful bulb successions. Now these gorgeous alliums are herbaceous alliums. The bees and butterflies love these alliums and I think they pair nicely with these. Are they tiny quickfire hydrangeas? I feel like I always get the name of these wrong. I'll put the accurate name on the screen. The boxwood and the liriope down below that edges the entire driveway garden has also started to bloom. Always room for improvement over here but funny enough this is the garden that I don't really feel like I have to do a lot of work on anymore. It's really turning into a nice picture that just takes care of itself. I think if anything it's just a matter of adding more of less, maybe some more alliums as we look down this way. Let's head into the backyard together now and I'll show you where we're going to plant this sublime hydrangea. I added three sublime hydrangeas into the main flower walk the other day. I popped one right here yesterday and what I'd like to do today is mirror that sublime hydrangea by placing one over in this corner. This is also going to help slightly disguise my rain barrel. I don't mind that you can see it there but I think to soften up this corner it will be nice to have a taller hydrangea right there just to fill in that area. We need to do a little bit of weeding back here. You can see that the crape myrtle has started to bloom. Isn't that wonderful to have some nice panicle-shaped pink hydrangeas over here in late August? So let's grab Grace and our shovel and plant this new hydrangea in the ground. Invincible sublime hydrangea is quickly becoming one of my favorite smooth hydrangeas to grow. It's hardy in USDA zones three through nine. I'm here in south central Pennsylvania which is currently listed as a zone 7a. In my area we can actually plant smooth hydrangeas in full sun or shade. They can really take just about anything. I'm currently standing under the shade of an oak tree, a crape myrtle, and two apples. So this particular sublime hydrangea is going to get almost full shade, almost no sun at all at any point in the growing season. However, I have other sublime hydrangeas in my garden in full sun and they perform just as well as the ones I have in full shade. By mid-August all of our smooth hydrangeas that were once white have now aged to a beautiful lime green and we can see evidence of that if we look at this lovely incredible hydrangea. It originally blooms white and gradually fades to this lovely very vibrant lime green. In contrast to that here is a bloom from Invincible sublime. Isn't that lovely? It's a deeper darker lime color. It's always this green color no matter what time of year it is. The fertile flower in the center of sublime is pink. You can't see that as well anymore but if we were to take a look at sublime in June you would definitely see that pink small fertile flower right in the center. So beautiful contrast in the garden no matter what time of year. What you doing Rock? You hiding in the stormproof hydrangeas? All right not necessarily root bound but the roots are definitely filling the pot so we'll go ahead and give them a nice tease. Let's take a step back and see if we like that placement before I cover it back up with soil. Isn't that beautiful? It's going to be so lovely to have all these new sublime hydrangeas in the garden. Let's head over to the main flower walk and I'll show you the ones that I added into that area. The Hyacinth bean vine has really taken off and has just started to bloom. This is from the seed that we saved last fall when we had this plant right next to the garden library. Here's the new seeding area that we created about a week ago and you know what we did cut back this really large firelight hydrangea about two weeks prior to that renovation but next year that will nicely cover this entire area right here. And now if we look at the main flower walk we have one new sublime hydrangea right there that is going to fill in this hole nicely. The climbing hydrangeas are finally starting to cling to the garage. Fingers crossed we get a really nice show of those next May and June. Another sublime hydrangea tucked in here where we have a hole. It seems like I've placed this very strangely but it's because Saving Grace is going to be popped out in the fall and then this will fill in that place so I kind of had to position it really close to Saving Grace imagining her not being here next year. I think I'm going to take out this Rubecca and the Veronica. Oh my gosh you see how this chair is moved over like this? I had poison ivy growing in the gravel of the book nook right where that chair was. Can you believe that? Where in the world did it come from? And here's where I stuck the other sublime hydrangea. I just wanted to disguise that corner a little bit. And then I think I did this the other day and didn't film it. I took out the heliotrope that was in the center of these pots and in its place I put in the fairy trail fresco hydrangea. That's the cascading blue hydrangea so I'm really hoping these make it through the winter. I'll go ahead and cover them if necessary but I'm hoping that by the time Better Homes and Gardens comes to photograph this area that those will be in bloom and we'll have gorgeous blue cascading hydrangeas in all of these pots from Henry's Studio. Oh let me give you an update on the vegetable garden. We haven't been back here in a while. It's getting a little bit crazy but check out how well the watermelons are doing. Growing up the trellis nicely and we've been eating a lot of cantaloupes. Of course you know this time of year everything is looking a little bit crazy but it's still producing well and that's what counts. Well friends thanks so much for hanging out with me in the garden today. I have some exciting news for you. I've already started on my parents' front yard garden renovation. I've got all the partners we need to complete the project and it is going to truly be an epic before and after. I'm going to need to produce a long series of videos just to get it all done. We live about 20 minutes away from them and my daughter's going to be starting school again so instead of doing a renovation where I show you the entire renovation in one video it's probably going to be a long series of vlogs but it's going to be so much fun. I can't wait to show you what's going on over there. I'll see you over at their house in probably a week's time. Bye!