If we’re honest, there is a teeniest bit of greed underlying our love of the hydrangea. Think about it. It’s like we don’t just get one flower when we cut a hydrangea blossom to take indoors, we get a whole bunch of little florets held together in a ready-made bouquet. It’s the best of both worlds – a big showy blossom on one level, but when you look closely, you’ve a fistful of hundreds of small but perfect mini flowers. (And yes, if we get all technical and listen to the botanists, these flowers are technically modified leaves, but it doesn’t matter to most of us because they look like flowers.) To celebrate the hydrangea, let’s take a look at these lovelies:

1.The classic mop head: this is the hydrangea we usually think of with its clouds of cheer-leading pom poms. But this one is better than any hydrangea bush we may remember from our grandmothers’ gardens because this Tuxedo® Hydrangea in red doesn’t grow into a rangy beast, it has been bred tough and is rarely affected by pests or disease. Best of all, its dark foliage is flushed with purple and black.

2. A blue punch: any gardener appreciates a good blue flower which makes this hydrangea worth its place in a pot by the back door or planted out under deciduous trees. It’s one of the gift hydrangeas and it’s called Blueberries and Cream™, which makes a lot of sense when you look at it up close because its lace cap form is made up of cream-coloured buds surrounded by those brilliant blue fully opened flowers. Pretty enough to eat.

3. A gift in a pot grows into a garden dream: the thing about Gift Hydrangeas Blueberries and Cream™, and Strawberries and Cream®, they start life looking very lovely indeed in a pot that’s the right size to hand to your mum on her birthday – a neat mound of foliage, covered in blooms. Better still, when your mum has enjoyed having it sit on the kitchen table for a week or so, she can then take it outside to plant into the garden where it won’t take long at all to grow into a sizeable shrub which will put on a flower show year after year. A gift that keeps on giving.

4. A sophisticated Tuxedo: yes hydrangeas had a reputation in the past for being romantic old-word garden plants. And then Tuxedo® Hydrangeas arrived and everything was turned upside down by their extraordinary foliage tinged with purple and black. The flowers are everything you’d hope for: luscious mop heads or lace caps in red, pink or purple. And the latest addition to the family, hydrangea Tuxedo Black Tie, has the inkiest foliage of them all (see below). Whichever you pick, they open up opportunities for creating contemporary bold massed plantings or dressing high focus settings like atriums or courtyards.