On Cape Cod we don’t care so much about about “Wind Chill temperatures” – we want reports on “Hydrangea Kill temperatures.” Knowing that our beloved Hydrangea macrophylla form their flower buds the previous summer, we all want those buds to make it through the winter so that our shrubs will come into bloom in the coming season. And since winter temperatures are more variable lately, alternating from unusually warm and then plunging down to frigid, we’re even less sure about Hydrangea flowering than we used to be.
Many of us have hydrangeas that have green buds that have been opening as if spring had arrived. We worry that last weekend’s plunge down to 12 degrees or colder might have ruined the flowering again this summer.
Bottom line? It’s still too early to tell. The fact that the buds might still be green are not a sure sign that they are still OK. Sometimes cold temperatures damage such buds to such an extent that although they look as if they have life, they never continue to open and develop. Only time will tell.
If you did wrap some of your shrubs as I did for the last weekend, be sure to remove those wrappings fairly soon. The warm sun at this time of year might actually accelerate a wrapped shrub’s bud opening, and then when you do remove the coverings the new growth will be even more vulnerable.
I wrapped two of my plants with blankets covered by a tarp. I have no idea if this will have helped or not.
Some plants still have buds that look green but they also have a bit of blackness that wasn’t there before last weekend. Only time will tell if the germ of the flower is still alive here.
Many of my plants have had buds that look like this since the fall. Again, there’s no way of knowing if these are still viable or not. It’s wait and see for these plants…
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