Post photos here....someone will be able to ID. Also helps to know where you are located as colder areas are less inclined to support some hydrangea species.

I would hold off on pruning right now. You may remove a lot of flowers. if the flowers are white and round, it's probably an annabelle. If the flowers are conical, it's either an oakleaf or Pee Gee. if the blooms are not white, it's probably a macrophylla. As stated above, a picture would help.

Yes, it would be very helpful to know the area where you're located and have a picture of the plants in question. You must be in a northern are if you still have snow on the ground. No offense intended, but I do wish people who move into a new home would take a wait and see attitude before they start whacking and digging up plants.

We are In Canada, E of Toronto, zone 5 I believe, had more snow than I can remember. For now I am attaching the only picture I have, I assume it was taken in the fall of last year by the realtor. I will definitely take more close-up pictures soon, right now its too snowy /slushy. We may have a variety of hydangeas, on the South, north and east side around the house. Two have still blooms ( now brown- they were whitish only in the pictures ), some don't. If without blooms, will pictures of just the leaves be enough ? Will post in a few days, hopefully.

I'd say your location/climate producing a bigleaf hydrangea (H. macrophylla) of that size is just about zero :-) And it's not an oakleaf, either. So it is either H. arborescens or H. paniculata but I can't enlarge the photo enough to say which. Regardless, both are very cold hardy and bloom on new growth so pruning them to the degree you want now - or as soon as is practical - is perfectly reasonable.

I would guess it's a Pee Gee.

Thank you all for your educated guesses. I am now attaching more pictures, two pics of each hydrangea. While all of them seem to have round flower heads, the first hydrangea has kept most and is different from the other two in that it grows with lots of branches, like a bush, and no buds were visible. The second and third hydrangea each have only a couple of flower heads left and have long canes without any branches, and I can see lots of buds on the canes. All these plants are located against a south facing wall. Hope this helps.

I’m in 5b, and hydrangea Limelight is very common here. I have a lot, and they look very similar to yours.

My hunch in the original picture is limelight or little lime

Second set: first two are paniculata rest are macrophylla

That is very helpful. Both the original picture shown here (taken last fall) and the first two pics ( taken yesterday) are from the same shrub. Following your suggestions that it might be a Hydrangea paniculata limelight, I read up on it online, and think that description fits ! And the other two may well be H. macrophylla.

Thank you all !

I am going to revise my comments as I was under the impression that the hydrangea in the first photo you posted was a single shrub and IME, NO hydrangea macrophylla grows that large and is that prolific a bloomer anywhere near a zone 5 (new wood bloomer or not)!

But I can see that subsequent photos do seem to show a couple of macs of significantly smaller size and with the odd remaining single flower.......far more in keeping of what a mac would look like in that climate.

Time has gone by, spring is bringing new growth. The Hydrangea from the first picture in my post of two months ago (Hydrangea paniculata ?) is budding out nicely. But I have serious concerns now about the other two shrubs (H. macrophylla ?). These two seem to have had alive buds earlier this year, but today these buds look shrivelled up and dried out. At the same s time new growth seems to come from the ground up, see attaches pictures. I wonder if the earlier buds dried out because we did not water early enough ? Or severe weather fluctuations?

I am wondering if i should re-submit the last question I had 5 days ago re the two H. mac? Never got an answer. Except for the new growth coming out fresh from the ground, see pics below, everything seems to be dry and dead. Bark has split along most branches and is pealing off. Should I cut it all out ? We had some really strange spring weather that might have killed the buds.

gardengal48 thank you so much! We saw healthy buds still in February, but now everything is dried out. Will follow your recommendations. And will try to find out how to protect these next winter for our zone 5 conditions.