No you are not doomed, but no flowers. Next year if the buds make it through the winter and don't get pruned you may have flowers.

You may yet get a few from buds at the base of the plant, if there were any and if they survived zone 5 winter.

On the bright side, the haircut probably will go a long way toward rejuvenating the plant, so if you can keep the buds alive through winter, next year should be a good one. Perhaps a fence is in order as well!!....yg

I second Yg's thoughts "On the bright side, the haircut probably will go a long way toward rejuvenating the plant" ... the Nikko may just concentrate on strengthening her roots and stems & buds that will form this year ... who knows mine has just shown another small cluster bud very recently ... we are in similar z!

Hi Jackz411 - How did your few Nikkos do after winterizing Hayseedman's style?
I haven't yet expressed a proper "Thank You" to the thread ... my now, 17y/o Nikko is loaded ... the minuet dance (it seemed) I did for her, paid off - I've never seen her with so many blooms since my kids gave her to me for Mom's Day in 1990! Next year I will concentrate on turning her blue.

'love to hear how yours did.
Ditas

Hi Ditas, Nice to hear yours did so well. I will update that thread, I stopped with the unwrapping in late May.

With my 2 old Nikkos (12 yr) about 80% of the canes survived and I have alot of green growth on the canes, but no flowers as of yet. At this point the jury is still out, but this is the first time the canes ever survived a winter. That overwintering thread is a couple pages back, I'll add some new pic's and info soon.

I also used the flat-box method on 2 of my newer Nikkos and they are both growing fines and have 5-7 flowers developing.

One newer Nikko I did not protect and it died back to the ground. I am a little surprised that it also has a few flowers beginning???

I also flat-boxed a young ES and it now has about 3 dozen flowers developing of different sizes.

I need to re-think my corral method on the older Nikkos--glad to hear yours did so well. What date did you remove the protection?

Hi Jack - Whew it is a scorcher out there ... been dirt digging and giving some haircuts & lecturing to misbehaving, aggressive perennials.

I fought the urge to uncover when we got the too-early, warm-preview of Spring in Mar. Nikko was the ugliest 'baglady' with white tophat out in back (I'll share photos when my son comes to help me pull it from my file) - she was uncovered around Mom's Day ... patience paid off!!! I think I counted 15 clusters the very first to open is now larger than a saucer others are smaller and still others are growing by the day. I didn't fertilize, perhaps I should have.

I used nylon p'hoses to bundle all her woods, dropped pine needles in before wrapping twice around with burlap, encaged her and dropped several bags of dried leaves ala Hayseed's (I used smaller white bags) around and topped her with a large rose-cone hat ... she was a funny sight under the arbor oh, but you should see her now!

Because she lost the dappled shade she depended on when we took an old Locust tree down, she tends to collapse by 4PM - the Sweet Autumn I planted has aggressively climbed the arbor I provided her but not quite all the way to the top so I just water her heavily until she gets some reprieve with Sweet Autumn' shade - quite a cliber she is!

I babied both my pairs of ES and F&E but only 1 of each pair, has blooms and only a couple on each too - I'm a bit disappointed - could it be sun exposure problem?

Ditas