Blooming problem for hydrangeas

Jessica Damiano | Garden Detective

November 16, 2006

I did not get flowers on my hydrangea bushes this year. Why?

Margaret, Central Islip

There could be a few different obstacles at work here. You don't mention what type of hydrangea you have, or how long you've had it. But a common cause of flowerless hydrangeas is exposure to high- nitrogen fertilizer. If you use it to fertilize your lawn - or your plant directly - it will pump up your foliage by concentrating your plant's energy there. Energy spent on foliage means less is available for blooms.

If you stop fertilizing, or switch to a low-nitrogen fertilizer, your hydrangea might take a couple of years to bounce back and produce blooms, but it will.

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If you haven't been fertilizing, then it might be your plant caught too much of a chill during last year's nasty winter, or that you pruned it at the wrong time (many varieties of hydrangea bloom on last year's growth, so pruning should be done only in very early spring.)You also might want to try protecting it by wrapping it in burlap over the winter and see how it does next year.

A great gift: pansies

I arrived home one day last week to find a flat of 40 pansies awaiting me by the garden gate. Immediately, I knew they must've been left by my neighbor Roxanne Zimmer. Little gifts have been known to show up - sans note or explanation - from time to time in a similar fashion, and Roxanne is always behind it. The beauty of it is that Roxanne is a master gardener, and so her gifts are always right up my alley.

Anyway, the pansies I discovered that day were orange, my favorite, but that's not the most interesting part. They also bore plant tags with pictures of penguins on them and the moniker Winter Survivor. What's more, they came with a money-back guarantee: "When planted and established in the autumn, this pansy will flower again the following spring, or your money back."

I had always known pansies to be somewhat winter hardy. If I plant them in the fall, they usually resurface in the spring. It's the summer heat that usually does them in. So when I phoned Roxanne to thank her, I asked her about them. We discussed the possibility that these pansies were a new, super-hardy variety, like Snow Angel and Icicle, which have been popping up at local nurseries the past couple of years. We also bounced around the notion that all pansies can survive a Long Island winter, and that these penguin-adorned beauties were merely a product of someone's marketing genius.

I put them in the ground, arranging them in soft curves at the front of my new border. But I couldn't leave it alone. I phoned Charlie Nardozzi, senior horticulturist with the National Garden Association, and asked him for his take on the addition to my garden. "It wouldn't surprise me if Snow Angels and Winter Survivor were new varieties, because new varieties are always coming out," he said. "But there's nothing revolutionary about them."

Regular pansies - and in particular violas, which have smaller flowers - have always been winter hardy, Nardozzi said. "It might just be a case of marketers trying to extend the season and getting people to plant in the fall, which, after all, is a good idea."

And why not? Since she bought them at the 11th hour, seasonally speaking, those pansies cost Roxanne all of 99 cents. New variety or not, if nurseries are going to push them that hard, planting them in the fall really is a good idea.