Hey friends welcome to gardening with Creekside. Today we're going to talk
about how to properly prune your butterfly bushes and your hydrangeas.
First we are going to tackle butterfly bushes.
It is mid-february and this is the perfect time to go ahead and prune your
butterfly bushes back. Butterfly bushes bloom on new growth which means we can
give this girl a great big ole haircut and we will still be guaranteed blooms
this spring, summer, into fall. Now this is 'Miss Molly' from Proven Winners and she
is a medium sized butterfly bush. She's not the dwarf and she's not those huge
ginormous big guys. And you can see where she's been pruned a little bit and then
she put on some new growth, but because we are going into Spring I'm gonna go
ahead and give her a pretty severe haircut. What you want to do, you could do
this two ways, you can use your clippers which is what I'm going to do or if
you're a very impatient person or perhaps your husband is going to do it
for you and he has power tools that he likes to use then you could do it with
electric trimmers. If you did with electric trimmers it would take like two seconds
to do and you would just go rrrrrr and then cut it back and there you go! The
clippers, the pruners allow you to be a little bit more precise in your cuts
which is always helpful. So what we're going to do is we're going to go and
we're looking at her and we're going to take, gosh you can easily safely do a
third of the size and take it back. But I'm going to go a little bit more
severe I'm going to take at least about half of her size back. So starting here
if this is my limb I'm gonna come where I have two little branches already
coming out. I'm going to cut right above those branches this is what gets tossed
away, now come Spring when she starts putting on new growth both of these will
be nice big strong sturdy stems so that's what I'm going to do and you're
going to want to keep them all relatively on the same size. You don't
want some that are real short and some that are real tall. You want to have
the average same height on your cut and you can see how fast this goes. Now if
you do have a ton of butterfly bushes or you do have the big old-fashioned
ginormous ones it certainly would be faster to use some power equipment. Like
I said if you use the electric trimmers you could even use a chainsaw. It's
really not going to be harmful to your butterfly bush but you're just going in
here and anything that you see like this limb is dead. It has absolutely no growth
on it whatsoever. So I'm going to take it and cut it all the way back to its main
trunk that it originates from and pull it out. Same thing for this guy. There is
absolutely nothing on it and no new green foliage. Taking that guy, out taking
this one all the way back. So if you see some dead stuff go ahead and take it out.
Your plant will be much appreciative on that and you
can see this is like we're taking care of this one
lickety-split. Yeah it's a gorgeous day so why not come out, maybe you had a
frustrating day and you can come over here and whack on some bushes but still
be actually helping. So you know and look, BAM!
'Miss Molly' is ready for Spring it's as easy as that.
Okay now let's go do a hydrangea. All right
now let's talk about how to prune hydrangeas. The first thing you need to
think about when you're pruning your hydrangeas is you really need to know
what type of hydrangea it is. Beside me I have a 'Limelight' hydrangea. 'Limelights'
are a type of panicle hydrangea and they bloom on new growth. So because they
bloom on new growth I can trim them in the late winter, early spring, and I will
get blooms this year. In fact it responds better if you prune it every year. You're
going to get stronger stems; you're gonna get bigger flowers; they're going to be
just overall a great bush, hydrangea with lots of blooms.
Now if your hydrangea blooms on old growth this is not the time of year to prune it.
Those would be ones that are kind of traditional mop heads the smooth
hydrangeas. You need to prune those immediately after they flower. That way
they have plenty of time in the rest of the Summer and into Fall to put on new
growth; that's when they're going to be putting on their new bud sets for the
following year. So hydrangeas that bloom on new growth, you will prune in late
Winter. Hydrangeas that bloom on old growth, you will prune immediately after
they bloom. Now hydrangeas are very similar to how we prune a butterfly bush. You can
safely prune a hydrangea back by one third of its overall size. And just to
show you how vigorous of a grower this 'Limelight' is if you will see right here,
obviously we haven't done pruning this year, this cut was last year where I
pruned it last year. Now I had now have three stems that have
come off of it and all of this was growth from this year. So look at that,
what is that? Almost 3 feet of growth that happened because I pruned it last
year. So what I'm gonna do of course got my trusty tools here I'm gonna prune it
back to almost right here and if you can tell right here on on the trunk on the
stem you will see there's a little nodule. You're gonna cut right above that
nodule that's what I did here and I got three stems so I'm gonna go in and I'm
gonna trim right there. Okay so I'm gonna go through again there's a little nodule
right there I'm gonna trim right above it and toss this down. All right
here we go we're gonna do this whole thing
here {music}
Now if you notice any dead branches in side normally that's gonna happen inside
your hydrangea. You want to go ahead and snap those off. Now how do you know if
the branch is dead? First of all you can come in here and
you can if it breaks really easy if it snaps then it's probably dead. Another
kind of telltale sign is if you look on the end of the branch it will have just
kind of an open hollow look to it so that way you know that it's dead and
that whole branch needs to be cut back until you get fresh growth. So see I trimmed
back and that's dead. See that if it were alive it would be a nice green edge to
it, but it's got a hollow point to it so this limb is dead so I'm going to
keep trimming back until I get new growth.
the way down alright so I didn't see any new growth so we just trimmed it all the
way down to the ground right. Getting back to business.
Okay guys so now it is all trimmed up. I probably have branches in my hair but
that's alright, it's part of gardening. So you can see we dramatically took a lot
of height off of this 'Limelight'. This guy will do fabulous come Spring into Summer.
It will just be covered in tons of new growth. Lots and lots of blooms. You see
I left the bird nest up there. I said hey might as well just leave it up there for one
more season and let's see what happens. But there you go! That is how you prune a
hydrangea tree. Thanks so much for Gardening with Creekside, and we will see
you next time!