Hydrangeas for the High Life

Gendarmes in Normandy are determined to weed out the dastardly miscreants filching flower heads from garden hydrangeas. Not to give as gifts, you understand, but to smoke.

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It’s the latest thing in la belle France, but gardeners in the small village of Hucqueliers near Boulogne were not amused by the nocturnal perambulations of the petal pirates when first they struck. Christened by police the ‘gang des hortensias,’ the miscreants moved onto other small communities, leaving behind bushes stripped of their blooms. Local pharmacist Maurice Dumez has explained the hallucinogenic and euphoria-inducing properties of the dried hydrangea blooms, whose effect is similar to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) found in the cannabis plant. Mixed with tobacco, it is a cheap – and legal – alternative to marijuana, but not unlike Cannabis sativa, without controversial hazards: a self-administered pharmacological misadventure, as Adam McDowell once put it. The practice may have started in southern Germany, where public parks had seen similar losses to those seeking the high life. In France, the police have blamed the deteriorating economic conditions for causing the search for alternatives to marijuana amid efforts to stay higher than the Eiffel Tower.

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American Indians used the roots and bark of the North American wild hydrangea, H. arborescens, medicinally. However, experimentally, it causes “bloody diarrhea, painful gastroenteritis, and cyanide-like poisoning,” according to Steven Foster and James A. Duke Field Guide to Medicinal Plants (1990). Beside H. arborescens, there are about two dozen other species ranging from the Himalayas to Japan and the Philippines and into North America. Some have been used in traditional Chinese pharmacology. But the common florists’ hydrangea, H. macrophylla, and others have been implicated in poisonings. Many have been extensively hybridized to produce much-prized ornamental cultivars. Foster and Duke’s warning has been repeated more recently by other authorities. Kurt Hostettmann, honorary president of pharmacology at the University de Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland, cautions that smoking hydrangea can cause “intestinal and respiratory problems, a speeding up of the heart and dizziness.” In excess, it can produce hydrogen cyanide, which can cause a hideous death. However, others dispute these risks, in the main claiming that the quantity smoked would have to be enormous. Still, the fact remains that while hydrangeas may not be up there with monkshood or poisonous hemlock, there remains an extensive literature regarding poisonings and their treatment in both humans and pets such as cats and dogs. French fumeurs notwithstanding, a hoary horticulturalist remains undismayed. “We don’t mind them going on trips,” he says. “We just wish they wouldn’t come back.”

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