How To Prune Tree Form Panicle Hydrangeas & Get Lots Of BIG, BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS 👍😊😉💚

Well good morning and welcome to Over the Vest Nurseries on a rather grey, overcast, cloudy morning in early spring. This is a busy place, there's lots going on, we're building new greenhouse, we're potting new plants and of course we're sending out lots of plants to our partnering garden centers, so I hope you excuse all the noise that's going on in the background. But what I wanted to do was to show you a little bit more about pruning hydrangeas. You'll remember that last year we filmed a video here in this garden where I showed you how to prune panicle hydrangeas, those are the ones with those big conical shaped flowers that are white and then go towards pink and are absolutely beautiful. But what do you do if you've got one that's trained as a tree form? You know what I'm talking about, it's exactly the same as the ones that we pruned last year, and incidentally if you haven't seen that video you can catch it here on this channel, it's called how to or should you prune hydrangeas, that'll give you the scoop on how to do all of these bush types. But this is exactly the same, except as you see it's been trained on a little trunk, it's a miniature tree, and instead of having it growing out from the base, this is growing in a tree form producing its branches and carrying all its flowers. So if you want to see how you can prune this type, here's how to do it. Now what you're going to need is a good sharp comfortable pair of pruners, and then if you remember, the first thing I like to do is to go in and remove any of the old wood, old snags that might be there from last year, or indeed even a couple of years ago, get rid of all of that dead stuff, because it's dead anyway, and it's not doing any good. Now if you were to see any dead or damaged or diseased wood, you would take that out also. But the thing with these types of hydrangeas are, that they're really good disease-resistant growers, so really disease fortunately is not an issue with them. As you see, these are old snags that are left over from previous years, they're dead anyway, so you might as well take them off and start off nice and clean. Then the objective is to try and achieve a nice open structure in your plant, so that there's plenty of air flow and room for the shoots to grow. And so the next thing I do, is to go in and take out all of these little skinny, weak shoots that are here in the middle of the plant, they're really not doing any good as you see, these really don't flower, so you might as well get in there and take all of those out, and really clean up the center of the plant too, by getting rid of all of these little weak skinny shoots. Then the next thing to do, is again to look at the structure of the plant, and I want you to look here, you see where these two branches are rubbing against each other, and then look down over here, and you'll see that there's another two rubbing against each other down there, and down here as well, look at this, so they're criss-crossing back and forward, and this is obviously not good, because that's a point where perhaps disease could enter, and besides it's getting too congested, so that needs thinning out. So obviously we need to address that, so let's get rid of all of those shoots that are growing in towards the center of the plant, and crossing each other, and that will help to resolve that issue too. So still looking at the structure of the plant, because as you see, we're looking to make a nice, balanced, well-shaped head that's going to show off all of the flowers. Take a look down here, and you'll see how this branch is kind of growing down, and this one's growing out in this direction, well obviously that's not contributing to the tree shape, so that's why I'm going to take that one off down there, and this one here that's kind of growing off out to the side, I'm going to take that back quite hard to about there. So now that we've taken out dead, damaged, diseased wood, all the little weak twiggy growth from the center of the plant, we've taken out any that are not contributing to the overall tree shape, it's time to then look at how we're going to prune this plant. Now the important thing to remember is that this particular type of hydrangea flowers on the current year's growth, in other words these flower shoots that are on here, all grew out this past year, and they were the ones that carried the flowers on them. Now it's important just to give you a little bit of history about this plant, this is now planted in this position two years going into its third year. Last year when we pruned it, we pruned it fairly moderately, the idea was that the plant had just been put in, it was still establishing a root system, it was getting going, so we didn't really want to hit it too hard. And that's why we pruned it back fairly moderately last year, really just taking it back a little bit, and the resulting growth as you see were relatively short and fairly small flowers. Now that it's got a great root system and it's poised for lots of growth, and it's going to make flowers that are even way bigger than these, it's time to be a little bit more aggressive. Now I should point out that the harder you prune something back, the more you're going to stimulate growth. If you prune something back with little pieces like this, you're going to get weaker stems, shorter growth, and smaller flower heads. Now I don't know about you, but I like the heads on these to be nice and big, and really showy, and that's why when I'm pruning my Hydrangea Beniculatus, I tend to be a little bit more aggressive than most other people. So that's why I'm going to take this one back to a bud that's here, look at this shoot growing out across the middle, so it's coming out. Then I want to show you that this particular stem in the middle is growing from here all the way out. Now that's crossing back into the middle of the plant, so I'm going to take that one out too. And then if you look at this shoot, you'll see that it's pretty much doing the same, it's growing from here up to there. So let's take that one out too, cutting it back to near the base of the stem. And then this one here is kind of a little bit growing towards the center, but there isn't a whole lot of growth here yet, so that's why I'm going to take this one back to that bud right there. And then look at the rest of this plant, here's a weak, thin, spindly little shoot here, that one comes out. Then let me show you this shoot here, which is kind of growing off in this direction, and I'd like it to come out here, so that's why I'm going to take this one back to there. And then this one here has a lot of growth on it, nice big strong shoot, so there's no point taking this one back really hard, so I'm going to take this one back to about there. And then as you see the plant is now beginning to open up. Now you may have heard me mention that I'm pruning above a set of buds. The reason I do that is, that wherever there's buds on a stem, it's a little woodier. You see the stems on Hydrangea Beniculatus are hollow, and you could get some dieback and then some dead snags if you were to prune it up here somewhere. So instead of that, what I do is I go just above a set of buds, and that means that you're less likely to have dieback at that point. So now I'm working my way around the plant. This is one here that's a little weaker, so I'm going to take that one back to about there. Pretty much the same with this one, it's growing out in this direction, and looks to be doing pretty good if I were to trim it there somewhere. Now look here, look what's going on here. I didn't notice this until just now when I touched the branch. Look how this is fractured and broken here, it's weak, and therefore this is not going to be too structurally sound. So we have to do something about that, which means that we take it right off at this point. If it gets tough on your hands, you might need a pruning saw with some of these older shoots, but in the main, as you see, we've now taken care of that weak spot, and this branch here will grow out, and in no time at all, this will be a nice well-shaped plant. So now we only have two branches left, and here's one growing up towards the center of the plant, we'll take that off there, and this one here will grow up here, and now look to see what's happened. Yes, it looks fairly severe, and it looks like I've really chopped the top off it, but let me tell you what's going to happen. All of these buds here are going to grow out and make beautiful big flowers that are going to be absolutely gorgeous during the summertime. The plant is going to be well furnished and nicely spaced with plenty of airflow through the middle here, and it's going to grow away nice and vigorously, and I promise you, will be really beautiful. If you're a little timid and a little worried that perhaps you don't want to be as severe as this, you can as a starter go in and then trim it back less severely. You'll certainly still get flowers, you'll get lots of nice twiggy smaller growth, but when you do this, I think you're going to find that it really will produce a beautiful strong growing plant with lots of lovely big gorgeous flowers. Now the last thing to do after you've gathered up your prunings is to put down some fertilizer. Now it really doesn't matter what sort you use, as long as it's a well-balanced formulation. If you're in doubt, talk to the folk at your local garden center, they'll be able to guide you as to what they believe to be the best brand or type for your area. Here I like to use a slow release fertilizer because this is formulated so that it works throughout the whole of the growing season, and I only have to do it once. And here the instructions tells me to put down about three or four teaspoonfuls per plant. So just sprinkle that around the perimeter of the plant, and then just lightly work it in with a rake, and then that's all there is to it. Just leave the rest up to Mother Nature and the growing season. This is David Wilson, enjoy your gardening, it's good for us, and it's very good for our environment too.