Hydrangea Anxiety

Is it possible that hydrangea are related to wire coathangers?  You know how wire coathangers multiply as soon as the closet door is closed.  Well, it seems as though the hydrangea multiplied while they were hidden by snow all winter.  I honestly didn't recall having THAT many of them -- it's taken me the better part of the weekend to prune them all.  


I have a checkered past when it comes to hydrangea.  For five years I ignored them altogether and they seemed to do just fine.  Then it became clear that a) we would have to relocate several because they had gotten so large they were being scouted by the New York Giants, and; b) I would have to do something to tame the wild bushes they were about to become regardless of where they were planted.  Fortunately, my dear friend Joanne came to the rescue, with a copy of "The Pruner's Bible" -- an almost idiot proof volume that explains how proper trimming contributes to healthy plants and clearly illustrates how to prune just about anything that needs pruning.  "Almost" being the operative word in that sentence.


It wasn't that I couldn't follow the instructions.  Really, I can do what I'm told.  The problem was that there are five different kinds of Hydrangea (arborescens, paniculata, quercifolia, macrophylla, and serrata) and while I could eliminate a couple, I couldn't say definitively which ones were what kind -- having long ago lost the little tags from the nursery that I meant to put in a safe place.  And it's actually kind of important -- because three of those varieties need to be pruned in spring, and the other two need to be pruned after they bloom in the summer.  So I guessed.   And cut them all back rather severely in the spring.  And, as it turns out, that was wrong. Very. Wrong.  They got even with me by producing lots of foliage, but not a single bloom.  


So last spring I didn't touch them.  And we were rewarded with both riotous growth and a wall of blooms.  It was truly impressive.  But I was so caught up in how great they looked that I forgot all about pruning them once the blooms faded.  And then it snowed, and now it's Spring, and they look like this.  A petrified snowball doily forest.  I can't leave them in this state of total neglect.  


As Willy Loman's wife says in Death of a Salesman, 
     "Attention must be paid."  


So, I went back to the Pruner's Bible and re-read it ve-ry-slow-ly, hoping I hadn't totally screwed up another season.  I found a glimmer of hope in this sentence:  "If spring pruning, remove only dead wood, as the majority of its flower buds form on shoots that develop after the plant blooms."  So I tried that, and also removed the petrified doilies, so now the hydrangeas look like this.  As do another 20 hydrangeas scattered throughout different parts of the garden -- including some I swear were not there last year.


I won't know for another month or two whether I've screwed it up again.  But either way, I've now realized that if you want a short wall of hydrangea, plant a variety that stays small -- you can't prune the big guys back into little guys without ugly consequences.  And just as a precaution, I've saved a bunch of those snowball doilies.  Worst case, I'll spray paint them blue and hang them all over my bloom-less hydrangea.