1.  At a friends’ son’s wedding they used marcescent flowers of hydrangea as confetti; they got it from Confetti Cones Company, Barnsley [e-mail, March 2024].

2. [photo] Well-dressing composed mainly of hydrangea sepals, Bath Garden Well, Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire, 25 July 2015.

3. I’m … well into my 60s. My own father was a gardener and his father … they were all Kentish people … My grandma’s horror of hydrangeas in the house is carried on by me; she threw up her apron in alarm if box [Buxus sempervirens] neared the front door, and she would not have lilac [Syringa vulgaris] indoors or in the garden [Paston, Cambridgeshire, November 1993].

Main image: cultivated, Burns Memorial Gardens, Alloway, Ayrshire, September 2017.