#hydrangeaceae

Photo credit: Jonathan Chua.

Hydrangea macrophylla that looks like the "You & Me Together" cultivar showing up in the conservatory.

Photo credit: Jonathan Chua.

Illeis galbula on Hydrangea macrophylla

23-MAY-2025

it's evening when she sets out, bells chiming as students mill between classes. she won't get distracted, even with all the new sights and sounds! ..well, maybe a bit. there are flowers she has never seen growing her, and the weather is so much nicer, but - no! she's on a mission!

( she does pluck a flower, though, discreetly. other students are doing it - so surely it's fine if she does, right? besides, she's a princess! )

there are so many faces. so many students, and most of them older than she. she puffs out her chest and pushes through the crowd with the determination only a teenage girl can carry, and finally - finally! - she spots a familiar bow and blue-pink hair.

"you kept me waiting long enough!" she calls out to her retainer, pushing her way uncaringly through the crowd to stand in front of him, hands on her hips. "how rude!"

and yet - despite her harsh words, she's smiling. a rare hortensia smile, the sort worth capturing on a canvas - a real smile, not that saccharine royal smile. the slope of her lips is gentle, her eyes bright.

she throws herself at rosado, wrapping her arms around his neck.

"how have you been?" is asked quieter, more vulnerable. closer to his ear. a weakness for few and far in between - a weakness for not just her retainer, but her friend.

he'll swear it up, sideways, and upside-down on the jana and the divine one and everything in between — that he was looking for her first! bonus points of being well-liked and having a bunch of people to talk to was that he was never ever late to the latest and greatest scoops, and even in a place as full to bursting with royalty as this academy, word of a princess still makes it down the grapevine to his eager ear.

did you see her dress? yep, that's elusia for you!

i swear the newbies that keep showing up here are each crazier-looking than the last. that's her highness princess hortensia you're talking about! and my best friend, to boot.

rosado, of course, didn't usually like to brag ( it wasn't very cute ) but today, today, he couldn't help it.

hortensia— hortensia— was on the way!

he totally didn't sleep last night. ( but when's that ever bothered him? )

so he'll swear it on his best brushes, his favorite platform heels, and all his sweet snacks for the rest of the week. that when hortensia finds him, it's because he's lost track of where to look at the town gates around so many people, and because she's always been a little smaller than most; there's no way a princess should be showing up to the academy unreceived, right? not by her retainers, and definitely not by her friends.

he'll remember that look on her face forever, anyway. like the kind of candy you had once as a kid that changed your life maybe, and you could never find it again anywhere else. and then one day it just shows up, completely out of the blue. he doesn't get to see it all that much, anymore.

"you're here . . . ! you're actually, really here! i almost can't believe it," he gasps, utters, and breathes into her shoulder, squeezing and rocking from foot to foot like he doesn't want to let go, grinning so hard his face hurts. she smells like the sea freshly crossed and the sky so blue and a little of the snow and ice of elusia, a little like powder and taffeta and bubblegum. and just when he's about to pull back to look at her to really make sure he isn't dreaming, she whispers again, this time like a secret just for his ears. how has he been?

he's been great; he's been happy. he's been totally occupied, and over his head in homework without her to help, and busy with training, and wrapping his head around everything there is to do here, and—

and there's really only one thing that's totally, one-hundred-percent the first and truest thing he wants to say. "ohh, i've just missed you."

Carpenteria californica

This shrub in the Hydrangea Family comes from the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Fresno, California. It is not common or widespread in nature, but it does very well in cultivation. The showy large white flowers are reminiscent of its relatives in the genus Philadelphus.