Planted Hydrangeas too Close! What to do?
Carol in Perry Township asks, ‘I have a couple questions. Four years ago, I bought three macrophylla hydrangeas called Glowing Ember. I know I planted them too close together. I didn’t pay attention to the heights and widths. And I’d like to know, well, the first question is, this year they only bloomed around the bottom. And I thought that was strange.
And the second question is, would it be possible, what would I do to the plants if I just cut them way back? Because they’re supposed to get six foot high and six to eight spread. And they are running into each other.”
It’s okay to let them grow together. If you want to have a solid hedge row of them, they will look nice and fill themselves in in that manner. However, if you want to keep them individual shrubs, that plant is in the macrophylla family, like you said.
It’s designed not to really be pruned too much. The only time we really prune that is for very, very light shaping and to take any of the dead stems out. The more you prune it, the more likely it is that it may not produce blooms as well. It will get a lot of foliage, but it won’t flower as well. So that’s the danger of pruning that one so much. Just leave it alone.
And it will look nice all filled in. I had some beside my deck for about 20 years, and the same thing. I kept them individual plants for a long time, and then they just started to get too big. And so I let them grow together, and it actually looked really pretty. It creates almost like a wall of foliage that way.
You can still get blossoms, but it will be very important that you use a blossom booster, which is a liquid fertilizer, or triple super phosphate, which is a granular fertilizer. Both of those are very high in the middle number, and it will encourage a lot of blooming.
Those plants also like to be wet, and that’s why you’ll get a— like this year, we had a really wet May where we rained and rained and rained, and it just wouldn’t quit. And so they bloomed really well. They will re-bloom a lot of times, but it takes a lot of moisture, and we just didn’t have that this summer.
But using those bloom boosters with a high middle number, phosphorus is that middle number. It’s going to help produce much more bud and bloom.
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