How & When to Trim Back Macrophylla Hydrangeas
I have an email here from Ann and she says, “first of all, when is the best time to prune hydrangeas and how much and where on the stalk do you prune? I have about four beautiful big green hydrangeas with maybe two blooms for all of them combined. I pruned in fall last year, but never had any luck getting them to bloom the following year.”
Judging by what she’s telling me in the email I’m going to assume it’s probably a macrophylla type of hydrangea, which means it gets a big blue or pink flower to it. It’s more of a rounded flower and it is quite common for those not to bloom well if we don’t get enough moisture. It’s moisture at the right time and fertilizer at the right time that causes them to set blooms.
Do not prune those until spring. When you prune in the spring, you want to scratch each of those canes that’s left above the ground. If the cane is green, you generally want to leave it. You can do some light pruning on it, but you don’t take it all the way back to the ground.
Any of the canes in the bunch that’s coming up brown, you are going to trim all the way back to where you hit greenwood. And if you don’t hit greenwood, then you go right back to the soil with it.
It’s absolutely essential that they get a ton of moisture in May and June, and a lot of fertilizer. I would definitely recommend using Rohr’s All Season Fertilizer. It’s a green pellet fertilizer It feeds for the entire season. You can put it down sometime in April or early May, and it’s going to take care of the fertilizing aspect for that plant.
But the other thing is, if that plant does not receive enough moisture at the end of May and beginning of June it is not going to set blooms. It does set blooms better off of old wood than new wood, so it is something you do want to prune in the spring if you prune it in the fall. You can have stem die back in the winter and that’s not good, so you want to wait till spring to prune.
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