They respond to deadheading of spent flowers but if you prune them instead, you may not get any because your growing season is not that long. That is because they will take time to develop new stems and new flower buds. During the hottest part of the year, plants like to rest and conserve energy/moisture. I doubt they would quickly respond. By what time do they begin to go dormant in CT?

Luis-
They don't go dormant until mid-late November. These are stems (many) that did not develop blooms at all this year, so, because they are re-blooners, I thought that cutting them back a bit (not too far) might encourage them to bloom. I don't understand why the blooms were so sparse this season. My Nikkos are blooming well, and I know the
site is good because they bloomed well last year.
Thanks for your help!

During the hottest part of the summer, ES will take a break and not rebloom until temperatures come down. That will delay any reblooming until August or September at worst.

As far explaining what happened with the blooms this year, there are some possibilities you could explore to see if they apply.

Start with the weather and plant health. Did anything change this year? Was winter unusually cold? Could it or late Spring frosts have damaged some of the shrubs? Has summer been unusual? More dry? Does the soil remain moist and well draining with the plants experiecing probelems? Are the affected plants going through periods of dry and moist?

Consider other factors next. Are you getting visited by pests this year? Like squirrels? Rabbits? Deer? They all like to eat the flower buds and can eat off one shrub and leave other shrubs (like the Nikko) escape unharmed. The catch with these pests is that, if they are troublesome in your garden, you would expect reduced blooms and not a complete loss (zero) of blooms.

Are the shrubs getting too much fertilizer? If the nitrogen levels get high, you will get fewer blooms but still nice looking shrubs. There are mineral kits sold that can cheaply measure nitrogen levels. Some MiracleGro formulations are 30% nitrogen and can cause this problem. Normal fertilizer applications would be something like a cup of compost, composted anure or cottonseed meal in June for the whole year.

Also, reduced bloomage and weakness in plant health after a few years of planting could signal that the plant is root bound, that is, the roots are growing in circles instead of outwards.

Hope any of those ideas helps, mayna.
Luis

ES were bred in the mid-west where the winters are a lot colder. Doing some digging I've seemed to notice people complaining about their behavior in New England. In some cases ES might indeed need more of a winter blast to properly reinvigorate the plant. On that note I would hypothesize that the gulf stream pattern that hits this part of the country year around might "mess" with ES's ability to properly cycle through. Nikkos definitely enjoy the gulf stream. ES may or may not condition themselves to these patterns in time, but if they don't you could always donate or sell them if they don't live up to your expectations by age 10 or so.

I'm not sure how/what you base the New England thing on. I've never had ES not bloom. In fact, the 2 I transplanted in spring are blooming their fool heads off right now.

Manya, I'd hit 'em with some bloom booster or something similar and see what happens. It's odd that your nikkos are blooming but not ES. I've never had luck with anything reblooming after a cut back ... not even clematis, but that's just me.

I know it's odd and has me stumped. I don't fertilize my hydrangeas except with coffee grinds. My soil is rich with compost, and they are watered well. I've always been primarilty a rose gardener, but the roses have had midge (don't ask) for years now and I'm tired of trying to fight that, so I've torn out about 100 of them and have been replacing with shrubs and perennials. My Nikkos are 12 years old and doing great, Annabelles are great, limelights and tardivas covered in buds....the invicibelle spirit and incrediballs that I put in last year, loaded with flowers. The ES which I have the most of and should be the most foolproof hugely disappointing this year. Maybe I will try some bloom booster. Maybe it is a New England thing. Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

Here I am 7 miles outside of Boston and I've got a hedge of ES that would make Dr. Dirr jealous.

I think it's a real estate problem = most hydrangea problems. Location, location, location.

Morning sun, afternoon shade.

If you plant otherwise, you gotta expect the consequences. And it's not like I'm being nasty, it's just the nature of the plant. If it's placed outside of that formula and it's not working, move it. No matter what the macrophylla tag says.

I've moved my ES at least 3 times. They're resilient plants. They should be about 5 feet tall with a bazillion blooms.

Your experience is not unusual. They are inconsistent bloomers in many climates. Be glad you got a good year last year. Not everyone does. They were developed for cold weather regions.

I have had a similar experience in Connecticut, with my second year of only one in four ES blooming. The Nikkos and lacecaps planted right next to them are fine. This year I cut two of them to the ground, intending to remove them later, because they were blocking the view of some of the Nikkos. After that they put out some new growth with blooms, so your idea of cutting back might produce results.

It's very interesting to hear that it might not be cold enough for them here - I assumed it was the opposite problem!

Do you successful ES bloomers fertilize? I am lucky if I get one bloom per plant. I have had these several years.

My ES is about 4 years old, still small but blooming beautifully for the first time this year.

My plant is on the east side of the house, getting morning sun for about 3-4 hours. Every single sunny morning it wilts! It recovers within hours of becoming shaded again, but all that wilting has got to stress it! There is no way I can provide any dappled sunshine for it in its present location, so I'm thinking of moving it to a much shadier location under pine trees. Do you think that's a good idea, or should I leave it where it is - which would be a perfect location visually, if only it didn't wilt every day! Will it stop wilting as it gets older?

Mine stopped wilting with age but we don,t get very hot here in the pacific northwest. If your part of that big heat wave hitting the country that would probly be why its wilting. You could try a nice thick wet layer of multch under the plant to conserve cool soil and moisture. I think I would pull the multch back out when normal temps return though. You don,t want to smother the plant.

rescuced to ES at HD-dry and wilted but huge so for half price will nurse them till cooler weather

I came on this site to ask the same question. I wondered if it was the past winter as my azaleas did not bloom either. It was plenty cold enough this winter, but we did have ice that stayed on the bushes for a while. We also had a month long drought last summer with the same 95 degree heat. I did have to cut more damage off of them this year. However, that doesnt seem to explain why the new growth hasnt bloomed, but the old growth has. I did fertilize differently. Maybe that was it.

The question now is, should i prune to keep more flowers on "old growth" for next year?

Molly Dog, I fertilize my ES a couple times a year. My ES is full of blooms, but it is not very big. Someone said it should be 5ft tall. I've had mine since they started selling them and mine is only 2-3' tall.

I have another hydrangea, Mini Penny, that only has three blooms this year. That is three more than it had last year!

I have two Endless Summer, a Sybilla, a Blushing Bride, and two varieties of Mariesii lacecap (one variegated, one not) in a single bed in front of my living room, which has a bed that gets shade in the morning and about five hours of full, hot afternoon sun during the summer. I also have a row of eight Limelights along my deck at the back of my house, which pretty much gets sun most of the day, although the morning sun is filtered by trees for a few hours.

Where I am in Southeastern PA, we've had some pretty lousy weather the last couple years with 80 inches of snow two winters ago, record high temperatures and drought last summer, snow again last winter that stayed on the ground from Christmas until March with ice storms (deadly to hydrangeas), and now we're having another of these "hottest summers on record" with more days of 90+ degree weather in July than ever before and more days of 90+ degree weather recorded in one summer than ever before and counting. To say I've been doing a lot of watering is an understatement.

However, with the exception of my Blushing Bride, which is admittedly being overshadowed by my monster lacecaps, all of my other hydrangeas have bloomed profusely this year. Even the bride did grow quite a bit and it put out a nice big bloom. This morning I deadheaded all of the plants in hopes to get the ES to rebloom as I read they will somewhere. My Sybilla has been reblooming nicely so we'll see. I'll note that all around this area, the hydrangeas have been beautiful--early in the spring it was on the wet side and cool in the evenings so almost all things green and blooming did beautifully, especially shrub roses and blooming plants like hydrangeas.

I do not baby my hydrangeas or cover them in the winter, although I do water the heck out of them daily and sometimes twice a day in hot weather--they need a lot of water. I do give them Osmacote in the spring and maybe if I think about it another couple times over the season. The Sybilla gets granular lime so it retains the bright red color, but that's it. In March, before there's any indication of new growth starting, I severely cut back the lacecaps. There was a time when I was nervous about having to have old wood to get new blooms, but I wasn't getting any blooms when I observed that. My variegated lacecap was my very first hydrangea and it had blooms when I bought it in the late 1990s, but then it didn't bloom again for years. It was planted in full sun all day so after a couple years, I decided to move it to its current location. It still didn't bloom or do all that well. In the meantime, I added the other lacecap and the Endless Summers and they bloomed just fine so any concern about freeze in the stalks wasn't an issue. I decided I had nothing to lose and I needed to just prune it. If the variegated plant didn't survive my efforts, I'd just replace it with a plant that would bloom. I took out all the icky looking stalks and cut down everything else to about a foot from the ground. That season--2006 or '07--it grew nicely and actually bloomed for the first time since the year I purchased it. It only put out two blooms, but it was enough to say I'd done the right thing. Since then, it's grown into a five foot by five foot monster that I have to cut down every year and hack back from the bride so it doesn't choke that out. The other lacecap is even worse--I have to hack it down to 2.5 feet every spring because it gets to well over five feet--any taller and it will block the window. The same is true for the Endless Summer and Sybilla--I prune them closely too and they also have responded quite well. None of this pruning affects the blooming--I worried, but due to necessity, I had to cut everything way back and they still bloomed. Old wood new wood--I think it's just too confusing so my rule of thumb is just cut it way back when it's not growing or blooming and I think the plant will know what to do.

I don't know if this helps--it seems to go against common advice, but it works for me and I've had really nice hydrangeas for years now despite the roller coaster weather extremes here.