The Complete Video Guide to Most Hydrangea Types

welcome to court tube my name is Jim Putnam in this video I'm going to be showing you six different types of hydrangeas that I have in my yard there are actually additional types then I'm about to show you but I feel like if you go to a garden center or a box store this is gonna cover most of what you're going to see there are hundreds of named varieties in each of these groups well maybe not in each of these groups but certainly this is hydrangea macrophylla all summer beauty right here in my backyard I've got hydrangea macrophylla Big Daddy that Southern Living plant collection one that I did a video on a couple months ago both of those are hydrangea macrophylla or big leaf hydrangeas they're both mop heads meaning they have the round ball of flowers like this one does they also come in lace cap varieties where they have a flat cluster you're going to run into potentially like I say hundreds of varieties that you could potentially find on these but they're going to be similar in needs the conditions they have when to prune them and when to fertilize them all those kinds of things are going to be similar so what I'm going to show you is like I say one of these in each of the six groups so let's get started so I thought I would start off with the easiest to grow first this is hydrangea paniculata this is more specifically hydrangea paniculata white wedding there are a lot of varieties of this one I just planted another one in my yard that you'll see the video on soon called Moondance there is an older variety called PG that's still available that we call tree a tree hydrangea it gets 15 feet plus white wedding only gets about 4 feet tall or bore to 6 feet tall and can be maintained around 4 feet tall we're starting to see color show up in these these have always been traditionally white the flowers but flowers start off kind of a greenish color lime green color and then turn brighter and brighter and brighter white oh there's one called pinky-winky that turns kind of pink over time and even reds showing up in these so the reason these are the easiest is because they bloom on new wood and they just go in the Sun so if you have a sunny space and you're worried about it getting damaged in the winter having to worry about when to prune it or when not to prune it these are for you you put the thing in the Sun you plant it you can cut it back in late February fertilize it at the same time walk away from it it almost always blooms reliably they're super super easing they're super super cold hardy I know PG will grow from zone three zones three to eight this white wedding is listed at four to eight so this one doesn't look like a whole lot right now this is hydrangea arbor essence Annabelle is this variety there are new varieties of hydrangea arbor essence with larger flowers than Annabelle which seems amazing and new varieties that have different flower colors again these are super super easy the other really nice thing about hydrangea arbor essences are actually native I forgot to even mention that in that Annabelle hydrangea video I did these are actually native to the eastern United States super easy plant again it doesn't matter on this one whether or not it gets damaged in the winter and properly pruned or anything because it blooms on new growth so this thing will come out in March or April as it wakes up and it can grow three or four feet in a single season and then put on this massive shove of big large round balls of flowers this is absolutely beautiful plant just as easy as those paniculata is back there late February you prune this thing back pretty far you can prune this one almost to the ground if you wanted to and then fertilize it and new shoots will come up from the ground and bloom that season hydrangea arborescent super super easy and native the next one I'm gonna show you is native as well so I forgot to mention on the hydrangea Arbor essence Annabelle that one is Hardy in zone 4 to 9 so again that's a theme of all of these they're very very cold hardy this is the other native variety this is hydrangea questo folia this is or oak leaf hydrangea is it's commonly called lots and lots of different varieties on this one again this one's called Snow Queen we these are all over the place as well they took traditionally just had white flowers and got very very large now we have varieties are dwarf varieties that get pink flowers varieties to get reddish flowers varieties that get super super long elongated flowers up and gold foliage varieties I'll be just all over the place this is a of all the hydrangeas that I'm going to show you this one right here is the best 12-month plant or year-long variety it has absolutely beautiful foliage in the spring beautiful flowers in the spring and in the summer beautiful fall foliage and then after it loses its foliage it has exfoliating bark similar to a crepe myrtle or a river birch just a just a four season plant I really really love oak leaf hydrangeas I got a couple of them in my yard again super cold hardy these are gonna be in zone 5 down to zone 9 and their native these are gonna require you'll see Sun or shade listed on these and I believe as you go up towards own 5 you could put these and a lot more Sun I tend to have the best luck with them in zone 7 be here in part shade the paniculata is the first one I showed you definitely a Sun plant Annabelle a little shade but it can take quite a bit of Sun I'm moving toward more shade as I'm showing you these and I think oak leaf hydrangea half-and-half would be ideal for it so this is hydrangea petit Alerus otherwise known as a climbing hydrangea it this was this one was in its own group for a long time and it actually got moved to another subgroup of other climbing hydrangeas there's actually quite a few varieties petit Alerus here's the only one that I really have any familiarity with I've seen a variegated climbing hydrangea of another variety but like I say I've never tried to grow them I don't have a lot of experience with them this is the one that I've always found to be the easiest to route and the most vigorous in the landscape these are fantastic they climb on just about anything you'll attach them to they have roots that grab ahold and hold fast to anything they're on so walls tree that's what this one's going on very very fast-growing they tend to take a few years to flower when they do they get white flat clusters of flowers that are fragrant which is a bonus in the hydrangea world has beautiful exfoliating bark in the winter time when it when it's you know when it doesn't have leaves just a really really really nice plant and not super super common so if you do find one of these and you got something for climb on that's that's a great choice and very very different than the other hydrangeas you know that it's amazing how you know a family of plants like this could have so many different variations from Sun to shade and blooming on old and new wood and all those kinds of things and that's something I need to back up on the first two we saw the hydrangea paniculata and the Annabelle hydrangea bloom on new wood okay oak leaf hydrangea the last one we looked at blooms on old wood meaning that the flower buds are on them sometime in the late summer from the previous year and if they get damaged during that winter or improperly pruned you will lose the flowers and so that's a that's an issue on hydrangeas the last one I talked about there is a change in another variety that allows us to still have flowers I'll talk about that in a minute again same thing on this climbing hydrangea this is going to bloom on old wood and so we have to be super super careful pruning these oak leaf hydrangeas climbing hydrangeas in the next two you're going to see we really we get a brief opportunity after they flower to meeting them up a little bit so the next group is hydrangea serrata or mountain hydrangeas I got to be honest with you I don't know a whole lot of differences between hydrangea serrata and hydrangea macrophylla this one right here is called Big Daddies let me talk about hydrangea serrata but there's not a whole lot of difference between them typically these will have slightly smaller leaves than hydrangea macrophylla and also the flowers will be scaled down a little bit but I really don't understand why they're in a separate group because if you were just walking past one I think it would be hard to identify my favorite variety of hydrangea serrata is bluebird it is a very long bloomed hydrangea these are definitely part shade plants they're Hardy in zone five to nine so here we are back around two hydrangea macrophylla all summer beauty this is a Ramon 10th variety I mispronounced that worth on another video I realized when I was going back and watching my own video one day but it's Ramon tit that this means that it blooms on old and new wood and this is a big change in these hydro macrophylla Swede traditionally had a variety called Nico blue and lots of other varieties I mean there are hundreds and hundreds of varieties of hydrangea macrophylla but the exciting thing in these is that we have new ones coming out seems like every year that bloom on both the old wood and the new wood still doesn't mean you want to prune it in the wintertime because the best flowers I've noticed on these from Vermont varieties the early flowers tend to be bigger the ones that were set on last year's wood the ones that come out during the season which this one is doing right now it's the middle of July and this thing has new growth from this year with flowers on it but the flowers are definitely smaller they'll be bigger in the future has it establishes itself but I've seen in all scenarios it seems like the the old flowers from the old growth are definitely bigger and so there it is hydrangea macrophylla this is zone five to nine same as hydrangea serrata you can see that they're all pretty cold hardy they all offer they all offer flowers but we have them where you know if you want a native hydrangea we've got two of those oak leaf hydrangea and hydrangea arbor essence if you want a full Sun hydrangea you can try hydrangea arbor essence definitely hydrangea paniculata or panicle hydrangea those are the ones for you if you've got a part shade condition the other varieties like hydrangea macrophylla or hydrangea serrata that mountain hydrangea and the climbing hydrangea as well would all work for that and the oak leaf hydrangea so there's definitely us but you definitely have a spot in your yard that one of these will grow and I think if we go back to hydrangea paniculata I think that PG would grow in zone three and then these macro filos grow all the way down to zone nine so anybody between three and nine there's a hydrangea you can grow a hydrangea of some type and then you have to determine whether you have Sun or shade and you know how low a maintenance do you actually want it because if you want it super low-maintenance hydrangea arbor essence or hydrangea paniculata is definitely for you we just wouldn't have to think about them you just plant them once a year pruning and fertilizing and you're kind of done with it so thank you very much for watching this video I thought it was kind of exciting that I had you know what I could consider the six main groups there are other groups of hydrangeas you go to a garden center or go to a box store like I said these are probably the six groups you're gonna run into and then you're gonna have varieties of each of these like I said this is hydrangea macrophylla all summer beauty I have hydrangea macrophylla a Big Daddy in the backyard that's what you're gonna see but those first two words are the two that you're looking for that kind of identify whether it needs sun or shade when it can be pruned and all of those things so thank you very much for watching this video and don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channel for future videos [Music]

Channel: HortTube with Jim Putnam

Views: 137,374

Rating: 4.8928432 out of 5

Keywords: Hydrangeas, hydrangea varieties, hydrangea cultivars, types of hydrangeas, all about hydrangeas, garden, gardening, landscape, landscaping, planting, plants, shade plants, sun plants, garden centers, box stores

Id: V3LZNQHaShI

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 29 2018