My first hydrangea pruning!

So I’ve been doing a degree in environmental horticulture at Burnley for eight weeks now. Before starting the course I had literally never planted anything before, so it was a pretty steep learning curve from the beginning! Every week is something new to me, and today when my mother asked me (because of my wealth of experience and knowledge, obviously) if we should prune the hydrangea on the side of our house. We decided that seeing as the state the house from the previous owners (who’d owned the house for 10 years) was, for want of a euphemism, a bit derelict, it probably needed a hard pruning and I thought I’d give it a go.

First I did a search on my university’s plant database, the good old Burnley Plant Guide, for ‘Hydrangea’. Even though most of the plant was dry and wilting, the budding horticulturist that I am managed to identify it as Hydrangea macrophylla based on the ovate shape of the leaves with serrated edges, its rounded inflorescences called terminal corymbs, and on its general erect form (and it also might have helped that my mother knew what genus it was).

Now I know a bit about pruning lateral buds, and from one of my many rookie mistakes in my practical class, I learnt that when pruning stems, you need to leave at least two vegetative buds otherwise the stem is useless. Just to be a bit surer though, I did a bit of a read on the maintenance of the Hydrangea macrophylla on the Burnley Plant Guide (what else?) and on Plants For A Future and found that this species is really tolerant of hard pruning, so off I went!

The after photo

 Pruned to the bottom two vegetative buds!

 The epic pile of cuttings

The process of pruning took about forty minutes with all my um-ing and ah-ing over which stems were too rotted (keep in mind this plant had been neglected for ten years) or too dry and woody to keep, and which ones were okay.

I was pretty happy with my efforts. I don’t think well see any great flowering next year, but seeing as the old plant was in a bit of a dire state the hard pruning might be worth it in the long run!