Hydrangea Trimming Versus Pruning in the Fall
We have Donna in Massillon, who asks, ‘since the weather has been so warm, is it kind of early to be trimming my hydrangeas or should I wait till maybe October? I have a hydrangea tree too. I had several stems or branches break off because there were so many blooms on it.’
A lot of times with the hydrangeas, it’ll depend on the variety is how I would answer that question. So for most of the hydrangeas, I don’t recommend a hard fall pruning. You can take the bloom heads off as they start to dry out and just not the color that you want to see. And you don’t really want to leave the bloom heads up through the winter months, just because the snow will weight down on them and it’ll pull the canes apart and the stems will bend over to the ground. So it’s a touch early. Most of the hydrangeas still have some color left in the foliage of the flower.
So I would probably wait just a little bit yet, but you could trim them if some of yours have gone brown and you just don’t like that look, taking those bloom heads off this time of year is fine. If you want to trim the actual canes and the body of the bush, I would wait till probably the end of March, beginning of April to do that.
For the tree forms, there’s some early blooming ones like quick fire and they’re pretty much almost done now, where the blooms are starting to turn brown. And when we get a heavy rain, it tends to peel them open. So those, I would recommend doing a light prune on again. If you get the bloom head off, it’s going to stop that weeping over that’s happening with them because the bloom weighs so much, especially when it gets wet.
So trimming that bloom head off, after you trim the head off the cane or the stem itself will stand back up most of the time. So you can leave the stems alone until spring and then also trim that tree form very hard sometime end of March, beginning of April.
And the breakage, that’s not uncommon. Wherever it snapped off, trim about a quarter inch below where the break happened and the plant will reflush, will reflush foliage out there. It may do it this fall. It may not do it till the following spring, but most of the time it will reflush growth at the next bud set below where the break happened.
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