How to choose the right hydrangea

We are living in the golden age of plant breeding and there is no plant that better demonstrates that than hydrangeas because plant breeders are putting out some amazing plants. Just in the past two weeks, Proven Winners and Billy Nurseries have sent out some amazing hydrangeas to me, many of which are new varieties. I think the two that aren't new varieties have been released in the past two years. And every one of these plants is amazing. But here's the thing. How is one gardener supposed to have every hydrangea? Like, we can't do it. So plant breeders are doing us huge favors by creating better and more interesting plants. But by the same token, it does get to be a bit of an issue in terms of how does a home gardener decide this is the actual one that I wanna grow and that's gonna be best for my garden. So how many different types of hydrangeas can you name? Arborescens, serrata, paniculata, macrophylla, petiolaris. There's other ones too. And all of this kind of becomes word salad for us gardeners. And I think a lot of people end up being like, hey, just tell me the name of the one I should be buying. And here's why I can't do that. Because what's good for my garden is not necessarily gonna be good for your garden. And everything depends on where you live, how you garden, the form that you're looking for, and what you like in a hydrangea. So because we're faced with all these great new hydrangeas, I think that as consumers, we now need to do a little bit more research than just going to the plants page on the internet. And bear with me for a second because I think you should be looking at plant patents. So generally speaking, the four types of hydrangeas that most of us are gonna run into are arborescens, paniculata, macrophylla, and serrata. And the first of those that I just want to mention is right behind me here. This is arborescens and this is good old fashioned Annabelle. And Annabelle is the archetype of the arborescens type of hydrangea. Also called the smooth hydrangea, it is generally speaking native to North America. And I recently did a video where I planted some really interesting varieties of this. So I will link that down below. Arborescens types generally have these mophead flowers. You know, they get these big flowers like this. They bloom on new wood and cut them back in spring or fall, whatever. They're generally pretty easy care, but they do tend to have issues with flopping. They're things that people are working on breeding out. Now, generally speaking, they're white. There is some pink in them as well, and that's not affected by soil acidity. That is just the type that they are. They're either pink or white. Now, I didn't get any new arborescens types sent to me recently, but I did get two paniculatas. And I think paniculatas are the easiest type for most people to grow, so long as you have sun. Because paniculatas want sun. Up here in the north, I'm in zone five, southeastern Wisconsin, it's full sun. If you're farther south, maybe think about some afternoon protection so they don't get totally crispy or need an absolute ton of water. So the most common one that many people know of when we think of paniculatas is limelight. This one is called Little Hottie, and this is from first editions. And this was new, I think, two years ago, maybe. But you get the idea here. This is what panicles are. They're sort of cone-shaped white flowers. They usually turn pink later in the season. I also got this one. Now, let's not judge this poor little guy who was shipped in a box and cut back, and obviously is not at its peak compared to this other one that's full of flowers. This is called Pinky Winky Prime. This is a update to Proven Winner's Pinky Winky original one. So if you're just at a nursery and you see these two panicle hydrangeas, you know you want a panicle, which blooms on new wood, which means you can prune it in fall if you want. You can broom it in early spring. You may not need to prune it at all. But these are pretty much no-fuss, no-must hydrangeas. If you are seeing these two in the nursery or maybe you're comparing one of these two to something else that's out there, like how do you know which one is for you? So of course we start with the information that can be on the tag. So check that it's hardy in your zone. If you're at a nursery in your zone, it more than likely is hardy for you. And then you can read the size on it. But what makes these two different? And that is where information beyond what you'll find on the internet supplied by the company can actually be interesting to look into. And that is where plant patents come in. The first thing you're gonna need to do if you wanna look at a plant patent is figure out what the name of it. Because Little Hottie and Pinky Winky Prime are not the real names of these plants. Those are the trademark names of these plants. Often patent names are gobbledygook that mean nothing. Now in this case, Little Hottie is Bale Pinone. All of Bailey Nurseries, which owns first edition shrubs as well as Endless Summer Hydrangeas and other brands, all of their patents start with B-A-I-L with Bailey. Now it's really easy to figure out what the patented name is. Often it's actually on the plant label. It's the thing that you'll see in single quotation marks. That will be the patent name of a plant. Now sometimes those actually are the name of the plant, but often when plants are produced by really big breeders, often they have a sort of a naming system that they use because they have multiple patents. So once you know the name, the actual patent name of a plant, you can just go into your internet search, type in the patent name and then patent, and often you don't have to look any farther than the abstract. So the abstract for Bale Pinone, Little Hottie, is generally, I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit here, characterized by its compact plant size, late blooming habit, and panicles that are creamy white in color and change to light pink in color as they age in northern climates. So it's also sometimes helpful to look at the breeding plan, which is part of the patent. It will say what the objectives of the breeding program were. So in this case, the objective of the breeding program included developing a new cultivar hydrangea with compact plant habit, heavy blooming habit, and high heat tolerance in southern climates. Now we didn't see that in the abstract, but if you live in a southern climate, like you know this has high heat tolerance. It will also get into a ton of detail about blooming periods and disease resistance and all of those things. Now Pinky Winky Prime has a really interesting patent name of ILVO-HPPRM. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. You can understand why they use trademark names. Now the abstract for Pinky Winky Prime, which we will call it instead of ILVO-HPPRM, says characterized by large conical shaped panicles with flowers that age from greenish white to white to pinkish red. Plants have upright habits, red immature stems, and dark green foliage with yellow green venation. The objective of the breeding program was to produce new hydrangea varieties with good habits and large panicles that age to vivid dark pink to red. The open pollination resulted in the new variety was made during 2003. First of all, that 2003 is interesting just because this has been in the works for 20 years now already, but it tells you a lot about what's different here. So like if you're really looking for that red color, like this Pinky Winky Prime is probably gonna be a better fit than this. If you're looking for more compact size, then you want Little Hottie. Now there's a whole bunch of other hydrangeas that you would be comparing these to because these are actually pretty broad spectrums of the paniculata realm. But my point is this, if you want more information that you aren't necessarily gonna get from marketing material, it's available for you out there. Next up is hydrangea macrophylla. Now these are called big leaf hydrangeas. These are ones that can go pink or blue depending on the acidity of your soil. And these are often sort of heartbreakers for us Northern gardeners. And that's because all of them bloom on old wood. Many are re-blooming, but we'll talk about that in a second. But that means that since they create their flower buds in fall or late summer, if they freeze during the winter, then you don't have those old flowers that are on old wood. Now, the breeding that's been happening with these is almost exclusively, not in all cases, but is really focused on getting re-bloom because they recognize these plant breeders that nobody wants that to happen. Nobody wants no flowers. And even people in warmer zones have faces. Like this year, I know a lot of people got no flowers on their macrophyllas, even though they live in zone seven or sometimes eight. But I heard this from a lot of zone seven gardeners because there was a late freeze. There's a late freeze, your buds freeze off, no flowers. And that's why the re-blooming part of this is so important, not just for us Northern gardeners, but for all gardeners, right? Because we want flowers on our hydrangeas as long as we can possibly have them. Now, I have three new varieties here. And the first one that you will definitely be hearing about next year, if you haven't already heard about it, is from first edition shrubs. And this is Eclipse. And I hope you can see it from there, but this has dark purple foliage and it stays that way. So you can see it's got this kind of raspberry colored flower in it. But what makes this special is definitely this dark foliage. Now they say this is gonna stay this way all summer. Sometimes dark foliage plants don't stay dark, but everything suggests this will do that. Now I think that's great because I think that that dark foliage, if planted with the right pairing, certainly could make this a plant that would be beautiful, even if it didn't flower, which is kind of nice to have as a backup with a hydrangea. So I see this working really well with something like Stachys byzantina, which would be lambs ear, or if you can push your hackle and clover all gold into a little bit more sun, you could probably meet in the middle with this plant and that would be great. Some contrasting foliage color would be great to grow this with. Now when you look into what this plant is all about in its patent, it's all about this foliage. This foliage is what makes this plant. Now contrast that with this Let's Stance Lovable from Proven Winners, which is new for next year. And this plant, when you dig into the abstract of its patent, was completely, the breeding program was all about re-blooming on this. That was the goal of that breeding program and that's what they were aiming for. Also aiming for a good bud hardiness on this as well. So you should be able to, you'll see probably pretty good performance as far as that goes. Personally up here, I really feel that in zone five, if I can stick my macrophyllas in a protected area, we'll probably get some flowers, the early season flowers. But again, since this is really focused on re-blooming, it maybe doesn't matter as much if you might lose those flowers over winter. So obviously, again, we're showing kind of a raspberry bloom on this, but you can change this with the acidity. A lot of times, plant companies will sort of pick a color to ship their plants at because they want all their plants to look, and they will provide that information to growers because they want them to look the same. They want someone to go, oh, that's Let's Stance Lovable, instead of seeing this one next to a blue flower and the average consumer thinking that's two different plants. Now, this is one from Bailey Nursery, but this is from their Endless Summer Collection. And this one is Popstar. Now, this is also a macrophylla, but it's a lace cap macrophylla. And we'll go blue or pink again. And it was really kind of aimed for its small size, but also a fabulous re-bloomer. Generally, I'm more of a part sun situation. We can push them into more sun up here in the north, but if you're in somewhere warmer zone, you're definitely gonna want some afternoon protection on that hydrangea. And crucially important with macrophyllas, do not prune them. I mean, generally speaking, you shouldn't be pruning them at all. If you have to prune them, you wanna do that in late summer. And that same pruning advice goes for the next category that I wanna talk to you about, which is hydrangea serrata. Now, this is commonly called the mountain hydrangea, and this has become possibly my favorite sort of category of hydrangeas over the last few years. Now, mountain hydrangeas also are pink or blue. They often have these lace cap flowers. In fact, I don't know if it's even possible to have a mountain hydrangea that doesn't have more of a flat flower that's kind of lacy, maybe. I don't know. I'm not the plant breeder. I just read their patents. But here's what's great about the mountain hydrangeas. These are from mountain hydrangeas. Hydrangea serrata is found in the mountains of Korea and Japan, where it is cold. And that means that these guys have good bud hardiness, which means even though these also are reblooming, we're gonna get that first flush of blooms on old wood, assuming that we haven't cut them off or a deer hasn't come along and eaten them, which can happen. So I am particularly excited about this one. And this is Tough Stuff Top Fun. Now, the other two mountain hydrangeas that I already grow are Tiny Tough Stuff and Tough Stuff, so I'm familiar with the line and like both of those very much. Now, the patent names on Proving Winters plants are very easy to find. They're listed on all their product pages towards the bottom in single quotes. And the catchy patent name on this one is SMNHSG. So SMN, I'm sure, is an abbreviation for Spring Meadow Nursery, which develops many of these plants. So the objective of this breeding program as listed in the patent was to develop new freely and remontanant flowers, that means repeat flowering, hydrangea plants with strong stems and attractive lace cap inflorescences. So these are the characteristics that they say distinguish this plant from other plants, and that's, of course, required to get the patent. Upright and outwardly spreading plant habit, moderately vigorous growth habit, strong and sturdy stems, dark green remontant flowering habit with numerous panicles per plant, showy lace cap inflorescences with purple, reddish, sterile flowers that when blued are purple in color and good garden performance. Now, if you really want to dig in, you can see what the parent plants might be. You can see how it differs from those, which might help you if you are familiar with those parent plants. Now, the last one I want to show you that came to me is quite interesting because this is from Proving Winters. This is Let's Dance Sky View. Now, this is interesting because this is a macrophylla and serrata cross. So without even looking at a patent, I can tell you that what they did here was they're looking for the flowers of a macrophylla type and the bud hardiness of the serrata. So they're aiming for increased bud hardiness with this. The goal was a truly remontant plant, meaning truly repetitive plant, meaning you should really be getting flower after flower after flower of this. And what I've seen from this in their trial garden suggests that that is the case. So like I said, I know all these sort of botanical names of hydrangeas get a little overwhelming at times, but it's really, I think, more crucial than ever to have a basic understanding of them or at least know how to get more information about them. So I would just say this, we are so fortunate to have so much amazing plant breeding going on in the world right now that us gardeners can take advantage of. If you have a hydrangea in your garden that is not pleasing you and is not performing, rip it out, get rid of it, give it to somebody who wants it, stick it in a far corner of your garden, stick it in the compost pile, do something with it because there are so many great hydrangeas out there. You guys think about this, Endless Summer, the hydrangea that I think was probably the most, the original famous hydrangea, probably, you know, I would say Limelight is the only hydrangea that even comes close to challenging Endless Summer in terms of name recognition. That patent was applied for in 2001. Now, Endless Summer was not actually a great performer for many of us, including me, because it does not have good bud hardiness, which is exactly what all these breeding programs are aiming for now. So that problem is being worked on and in many cases has been fixed through various different breeding strategies. Think about how far hydrangeas have come in the 22 years since that plant, they first applied for a patent on that plant. So there are good hydrangeas out there. In fact, there's tons of good hydrangeas out there. So just dig in a little bit, be a really informed gardener and dig in just a touch, all this information is out there with just a small amount of internet searching and find the one that's gonna be right for you in your garden because I can almost guarantee the perfect hydrangea is just out there waiting for you. So what is that hydrangea gonna be for you?