Hydrangea pruning 101💚, potting on and some seed sowing!
Hello friends!
Oh the joy of being able to walk outside and not be bent double trying to prevent frostbite! I love it when the crocuses open up wide, like the beaks of hungry baby birds, because it means that the sun is out. Here are my five minute forays this week.
Monday: It’s one of those rare moments where I have more than five minutes. I lollop lazily about, removing a few bits of couch grass, and about eleventy billion tiny sycamore seedlings that have to be dealt with when you live beneath a sycamore tree. I’m always a bit amazed that these things even bother to germinate when they land so near to their parent. I walk back to the house, and notice that I haven’t yet tied in my clematis, having cut it back a few weeks ago. It’s just been lying there, prostrate, forgotten. Naughty me. I grab a bamboo cane and drive it into the soil, and tie the two muddy stems to it quickly. Buds are fattening. I can see them everywhere. Joy.
Tuesday: I take the faded flowers off my hydrangeas. I have two paniculata standards, one mophead, and an Annabelle. Here’s a little hydrangea pruning 101 if you’re not quite sure what to do:
Most hydrangeas will be perfectly happy without any pruning at all, but If you think that your plant is under-performing, or out of shape, then pruning it could be just the ticket to billowing clouds of blooms this summer. Mop-heads and lace-caps (macrophylla) have thick, toothed, heart-shaped leaves. Blooms are usually blue, pink or purple. Lace-caps have tiny fertile flowers surrounded by larger infertile ones, and mop-heads, as the name suggests, have large blooms all over. Quercifolia (oakleaf) are easy to identify from their wavy-edged leaves. If yours is performing well, then get out there and remove the faded flowers and any dead or diseased stems. If the plant is a bit lacklustre, then removing one third of the living stems from the base should pep it up. Arborescens (the most common of these is the cultivar ‘Annabelle’) has much thinner, floppier, smoother leaves and big lollypop-like blooms which start off green, become white and then turn green again. Paniculatas have smaller leaves that grow three to a stem, in a whorl. Blooms come in a variety of different shapes but always start off white and fade to dusty pink with time. Both of these bloom on new wood so if the shape bothers you, then now is the time to correct things, removing any wayward stems, or pruning to a framework, just above a pair of buds, before the plant starts galloping away with the warmer weather. Climbing hydrangeas can be left well alone until after flowering.
Wednesday: The sun is shining. The forecast is saying snow this weekend but I am firmly ignoring it. How DARE it? I brush the cobwebs off six plastic pots and re-pot the scented pelargonium cuttings I took last xxxx They are looking gorgeous and will live in my house, because as far as I’m concerned, scented pelargoniums are THE houseplant to eclipse all others. I wonder momentarily whether to nip them back a bit, for stockier plants, but decide against it for now. I love taking cuttings and watching them sprout. It’s one of my favourite gardening things.
Thursday: It is warm! I decide to sow some seeds. Quick quick, before someone calls for me to wipe their bottom or some such nonsense. All of my seed sowing cells (plastic) are now broken and I don’t want to buy any more plastic things, so I use larger plastic pots and resign myself to the fact that I’ll have to prick out, rather than just thinning the seedlings to one per cell. I fill the pots with multi-purpose compost mixed with perlite, and I water the pots first. I sow three pots full of alpine strawberries, to fill in some gaps and give away to friends, and two pots of chilli peppers. The alpine strawberries need no covering at all. The pepper seeds need to be half a centimetre deep. I put all the pots back in the kitchen, covered with a propagator lid. This is the most satisfying of five minute jobs.
Friday: I decide to re-pot my lilac trees. They've been in the same containers for years and it's time they had new compost and a larger home. But some things are just not meant to be. I had thought of investing in some very beautiful terracotta that I spied recently at my local nursery, but at the last minute (and after studying my bank account from various angles) I decide against this, and go for fibreglass faux terracotta, which won't break, and therefore break my heart. All this takes too long. No gardening.
As I write, the temperature is dropping and apparently we must be ready for snow. I'm still hoping this is all a cruel lie.
See you on the other side lovely newsletter friends!
All the good things, until then...
xx Laetitia
Daily posts on instagram www.instagram.com/laetitiamaklouf
You can find my books here and here (Sweet Peas for Summer is a bargain right now at only £2.99!)
Do you Pinterest? Is that even a verb? Anyway, I love it and you can find me here
I'm also on Twitter if you tweet