Location Taken: Garfield Conservatory, Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: April 2008
Hydrangeas are fabulous flowers, technically clusters of flowers all growing off the same stem and forming a giant ball of flowery goodness. And they can come in a very large variety of beautiful colors, usually based on the acidity level of the soil they’re growing in!
That’s why they are one of the flowers most likely to be mentioned in murder mysteries, you know. The usual plotline for a hydrangea mystery starts with a detective/botanist noticing an unusually colored hydrangea. They poke around a little and check just what the gardener is using to get that color, only to find it’s being fed by human remains! Oh, the plot thickens!
Now mind you, these days we’ve mastered the art of soil manipulation, having all sorts of (non-human-remains-based) additives to toss into the soil to make the plants grow tall and strong and exactly the color you want. So don’t go digging under any brilliant hydrangeas looking for bones. You’re far more likely to get an irate gardener mad at you for killing their favorite plant by ripping its roots out of the ground. Which might produce a murder mystery of its own, given how blazingly powerful the anger of a wronged gardener can get, but that’s another story entirely.
