Beautiful Hydrangea
Decorating Ideas
you'll want to copy

Somewhere between the ferry landing and the top of Main Street, hydrangeas begin. They pour over picket fences, foam out of window boxes, and sit in tin buckets on farm stands with the price written in chalk. By the second week of July, the whole island is a slow, blue tide. You stop noticing where one hedge ends and the next begins.

No one voted the hydrangea Nantucket's unofficial flower. It happened the way these things do — one Sunday you look up from the newspaper and there they are, already inside the house. On the mantel in a milk pitcher. In a ginger jar by the front door. Papering the coffee table beside a stack of hardcovers. A vase of them on the kitchen island is the closest thing an old cottage has to a signature.

We wanted this issue to be about that quiet ubiquity — the way one flower, cut in the morning and dropped in water without ceremony, can change the entire feeling of a room. There is a reason hydrangeas keep turning up in the shelter magazines we love. They don't chase a trend. They soften a room without dressing it. They bring the outside in without asking for anything in return.

We've always believed that timeless decorating is really just editing. You take one beautiful thing — a bowl of blue mopheads, say — and let it earn the surface. You resist the second candle, the third throw pillow. You leave the mantel a little bare so the blooms have somewhere to breathe. Hydrangeas teach that habit better than any book on design does. Their scale demands it.

What follows is a magazine, not a shopping list. Twelve chapters — some short, some slow — on how to decorate with hydrangeas the Nantucket way. There is a history, a palette, a formula. There are five rooms and seven mistakes. There is a designer's rule of thumb for the arrangement itself, and a chapter on the difference between fresh and faux (and when the answer is quietly both).

If, by the end, you find yourself walking out to the yard with kitchen shears in one hand and a milk pitcher in the other, we've done our job.

— The Editors, Nantucket Charm