Pruning Your Hydrangeas? Proceed With Caution!

Garden know how is important when trying to get the most abundant bloom from your hydrangeas. They can be tricky to prune in order to bloom abundantly. Hydrangea bloom hue is effected by soil treatment and fertilizer. Hydrangeas can be extremely particular about the light conditions that they prefer.The following tips are intended to assist you in pruning and caring for your hydrangeas for optimal bloom.

Hydrangea plants come in many different varieties. Hydrangea arborescence,is one type of hydrangea and they have big white flowers and bloom on new wood. Hydrangea arborescence varieties flower on “new” wood and should be pruned in Autumn. They will produce new stalks in the spring which will bloom. The popular tree like hydrangeas are also white and are called paniculata hydrangeas and they benefit from fall pruning. Simple rule to follow: white blooms, fall prune.

It gets more complicated when you realize that there are other kinds of hydrangeas called hydrangea macrophyllas-these are the kind of hydrangeas that have light pink to dark blue flowers Hydrangea macrophyllas bloom on “old” wood and can ONLY be pruned before Mid-July the year before. I did say this would be somewhat difficult, but not impossible?There is also oakleaf hydrangea which is also an “old” wood bloomer. So when would you prune it?? Before mid july or no later than august the summer before.

There are a few things you need to do in order to promote your hydrangea macrophyllas to bloom in pink or blue. If you want blue you need to acidify the soil and add aluminum to the soil. You can use pine needles, and throw down a bunch of pennies or rusty nails(yeah, my thought exactly)to help acheive this. Changing the pH of your soil from alkaline to acid is a lot of hard work and does not usually go so well. People with more clay and less aluminum in their soil usually get the pink hydrangeas. Incidentally if you can’t get them to bloom in exactly the right color you were hoping for you can always put a few gazing globes on ornamental metal stands in the hydrangea bushes in blue or pink to get the color that way. These will look pretty and provide the hint of color you were attempting to get minus all the hard work.

Hydrangeas have very special light requirements and can look bad if they are not in the right location. Partial shade is recommended for hydrangea plants. If you plant hydrangeas in full sun they won’t die, but you might wish they had. They will live in full shade, but they won’t look good in full shade. Hydrangeas do best when they are plante in a spot that gets AM sun and PM shade. And as the name suggests they do not do well in drought(dry) conditions so remember to water them regularly and they should grow so abundantly you can use them as a hedge to hide an unsightly air conditioning unit, or plant them around the base of a ceramic bird feeder to hide all the spent seeds.

These [helpfull] hints should help increase the abundance of flowers on your hydrangeas. It is helpfull to have some information about the type of hydrangea you are dealing with before you do anything. The bountiful bloom on these plants will be your reward if you can just follow these simple rules.

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