Hydrangeas on steroids.....Help!

14 years ago

My house has nearly 20 hydrangea shrubs both in front and in back. The photo shows them when they were of a manageable size a few years back. I never feed or even water them but they got so big they nearly covered the walkpath and seemed very out of scale with the front of our Cape Cod style house. I know you aren't supposed prune these but I finally had to do something and last fall I cut them back by about a third. All that did was encourage them. This summer they are even bigger than they were before except with very few flowers, mostly on the bottoms of the shrubs where I didn't do any cutting. Is there a way to get reduce the size of these plants? Most of them are Endless Summers. Thank you for any suggestions.

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October_Gardens
14 years ago
In short, no, not really.

You are in one of the PRIME locations for growing hydrangeas in the US. People literally have to fight theirs back each year. And some even enjoy partial covering of walkpaths. However if you want yours back (lol), it would be rather difficult to move everything out (including the path) further from the house. One thing you could try is prune them down to 1-2' NOW (a.k.a. early August at the latest, but preferably mid-JULY). That way you'll at least get a fair amount of old wood blooms if some of them aren't ES.

As for how much they grow each season, that can't really be controlled. If you want smaller plants, you might want to try some more compact varieties (ones that grow to 2-3' max). There are plenty of those that should be bud-hardy in you location. For example, the 'Let's Dance' series isn't supposed to be as large as ES, but they are closely related.
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