Hydrangea pruning: Don't sweat it!

well the snow is almost gone and so that means it's time to prune some hydrangeas so that's what I'm doing today so the time to prune your hydrangeas is late winter or early spring I'm in southeastern Wisconsin zone 5 so I'm probably a little bit later than a lot of other people are but don't stress about this it's not a small window you can stretch this a little bit as long as you don't have active leaf growth going on you can prune in any case what you want to do is wait until you see leaf buds swelling on the stems and that's the time to go at these so the first thing you want to know about pruning your hydrangeas is don't stress about this this is not a high stress situation it's very hard to screw this up if you have a hydrangea that was alive when you started this process I can almost guarantee that you can do just about anything to it and it will be alive at the end of this process so you're not going to kill it so don't worry about it it's these are extremely forgiving plants so what you're going to need to prune is a hand pruner a loppers comes in handy for bigger branches unfortunately this is an anvil type pruner I can't find my press bypass pruner so find your bypass pruner and use that if you need to or what I've been using more than that is actually trimming saw this is a this is a quite a substantial one these are great I actually starting to like these better than using the lapper so get whatever you need just make sure that you have something to cut bigger branches and something to cut the smaller ones so this is a panicle hydrangea called limelight you're probably familiar with it because it's a very popular hydrangea because it's a great hydrangea but most panicle hydrangeas are going to get pruned in the same way um you want to take it down about 1/3 to 1/2 although I will tell you you can take it down much further and it will be ok because I've done that once I once took this one down to probably 18 inches it's amazing how much girls these put on in a season when they're in a place where they're happy which is generally more Sun than you might think he's sorry for the voiceover but my cut out when I was making the video I leave the flowers of my hydrangeas in winter just for great winter interest but beyond just cutting those off what you want to do when you're pruning is really take a look at the shape and get it into the shape that you are looking for this is a personal decision it's there's no real right or wrong here so what you need to do is just take a look at it and see what you want to do with it so when you're pruning you want to prune back to a leaf bud so if you look at my hand that's swelling over my middle finger that's a new leaf bud coming there and so that's what you're looking for and you want to cut back to one of those so that you cut that and right above that is where you make your cut after that you just start going for it [Music] so there's this branch that's kind of reaching from here all the way across and I don't really want that I want this side to grow out so I'm actually going to take out this big branch that's crossing all the way across I'm going to try that with my saw first and hopefully that'll work now the next thing that is a concern is do you see how these two are crossing through here so these two are gonna rub on each other and that is gonna could cause disease so what I need to do is decide what's going to go here and I actually think for now I'm going to take out this one you know keep in mind things don't grow super fast on this so if I don't like how that's working out next year when I prune this next year I can take that out and I'm going to take this one out altogether because it's too close to this and again there's no there's no right or wrong on this this is up to you so don't don't overthink it don't sweat it too much if you don't like what you did you get another shot next year there's always time next year this one is pretty bigger I take that out so right here there's two branches two little branches that are definitely rubbing on each other so one of those has to go and it's gonna be that one and then the rest of these I'll just prune down a bit so they're not sticking out okay so that's all I'm gonna do you know the thing with pruning is sometimes you just have to know when to say when and I often don't I don't think I over pruned on this one but I could stand here and start fidgeting with things for a long time so that's pruning a panicle hydrangea in particular lime light now the good news is is that the rest of the ones we're gonna do are much easier so this is Anabelle hydrangea this is super easy all you need to do is you can a you can take this down all the way to the ground if you wanted to but what most people do is leave a little bit of stem to provide some strength to those stems if you take it all the way down all of the growth is new if you take it down to say maybe 18 inches or so then you get a stiff stem from last year's growth with new growth coming out of it so you get a little bit more stability because one of the problems for the Annabelle is that it tends to flop a little bit so in order to counteract that all you have to do is cut them down to pick your length I'm gonna probably aim for like 18 inches or so maybe a little lower than that to offer a little bit of strength and try to help keep those blooms up off the ground on this when you're when you're doing Annabelle it's a good idea if you can to cut back to right above a leaf again but I have seen people prune these with hedge pruners and they obviously aren't worried about where they're cutting so do it back to the leaf if you're doing it by hand if you have a whole hedge of these and you need to take care of it you know what it'll figure itself up [Music] so these three hydrangeas right here are all sort of Annabelle cousins this is one of these is invincible spirit and I think there's two Incredibles to be honest with you I can't remember which is which right now because they all look the same when they're dormant but it doesn't matter because they all get pruned the same way so these are all I'm sort of improved versions of Annabelle so it's going to be the exact same treatment as well just sit with the Annabelle which is just cutting them back to say 18 inches or so to provide a little bit of strength to those to that new growth and if you really wanted to you could cut these all the way back on this as well [Music] [Music] so that took like five minutes to cut those down maybe not even you know the hardest part is just you have to come back and pick up all the branches now if you're a better garden name you might actually have a wheelbarrow here and fill it up as you take things down but that's not how I operate make a mess and clean it up later okay there's one more kind of hydrangea we're going to take a quick look at so the last hydrangea I'm going to talk to you about pruning about today is Bo Bo hydrangea now this is another panicle like the limelight we did earlier but this is a very low growing on so you don't have to worry a lot about pruning this one up you should at least though get the dead flowers off it because those will stay on there for a long time and if the new flowers come it's going to be real hard to get those off so at least at the very least clean up the flowers I actually had a lot of deer browsing on this this year so I'm going to go through so there's a lot of really rough really rough edges on this where they sort of ripped it so I'm gonna go through and just sort of prune everything back maybe by a quarter that would be as much as I'd probably take this one down because I don't want it to be super stumpy so that's all I have to do on this one so that's all the hydrangea pruning I'm gonna do today I'm gonna finish up on this bow bow and then I'm done for the day after I do all that cleanup but you know the message here is don't overthink the pruning it's not rocket science there's a few decisions to be made on some of them like with that lime light the rest of them are basically like chop them down more or less so don't worry about it don't overthink it gardening's supposed to be fun and you know even this stuff can be fun especially when you're dying to get outside so you guys have a great day thanks for watching

Channel: The Impatient Gardener

Views: 433,258

Keywords: hydrangea pruning, hydrangeans, limelight hydrangea, hydrangeas, gardening, pruning, how to prune shrubs, how to prune hydrangeas, paniculata hydrangea, zone 5 garden, hydrangea arborescens, annabelle hydrangea, bobo hydrangea

Id: r5LHyYtdddU

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019