Hydrangea serrata 'Fuji-no-taki'

'Fuji Waterfall' or 'Fuji-no-taki' has lovely cascades of 5-6 inch lacecaps with white, sterile, double florets that resemble shooting stars. Hydrangea serrata is like H. macrophylla but smaller in stature, foliage, and flowers making it perfect for quieter situations and small spaces. Mountain hydrangea tend to be smaller than and perform better in zones 5 and 6 than Hydrangea macrophylla.

I'm digging the complicated flowers of Hydrangea serrata in general and those of Fuji-no-Taki have me captivated. They are entirely different from any hydrangea in our garden. They start out greenish white (or mottled green-white), then open white, remaining white as they age. Fuji-no-Taki's flower structure is so wonderfully odd. The flower head is a small, misshapen mophead or probably a modified lacecap (something between a mophead and a lacecap). The sterile florets have a double row of sepals. The individual sepals are rounded; with the double rows and the roundedness, the sterile florets have a soft, puffy aspect, like clouds or pillows. My apologies that my pictures don't do the flowers justice - it's because my experience with this cultivar is green - I was given the parent plant summer of 2017 and have never seen it before in gardens. I will work on improving these pics. The fall color turned out to be delightful! It's true yellow. Not butter yellow, burnt yellow, mustard yellow, or golden yellow, but true bright pure yellow. Check out the picture. This was not an exceptional year for fall color and Fuji-no-Taki's leaves positively glowed in the garden and on our 1-gallon container plants. (November 2018) Something else I love about the Fuji-no-Taki type is how well it branched out when I pruned it. I took cuttings for propagation right before we went into a late Summer heat wave and the 1-gallons didn't miss a beat (and 99% my cuttings took). The plants put on new growth and the plants exploded in width. Now I have nice fat Fuji-no-Taki hydrangeas. Fuji-no-Taki is a serrata species and therefore more reliably cold hardy than many macrophylla types.