Common Hydrangea pruning mistake could leave you without bloom ‘next season’

Pruning mistakes could cost your next season’s bloom (Image: Getty) A green-thumbed enthusiast is alerting fellow gardeners to a common mistake preventing their chances of a bloom next season. As some of the summer’s most anticipated blooms , gardeners often take their first annual blossoms as a signal to start pruning for the next season. But pruning mistakes are all too common according to @doublecloverfarm, who says deadheading hydrangeas will look drastically different depending on the variety of shrubs you’re dealing with. The content creator is the first to admit pruning hydrangeas ‘can be tricky’, having learned the hard way old-growth hydrangeas should only be cut back at a specific time. ‘If you make this pruning mistake you’re gonna have no hydrangeas next year,’ she explained in the video. ‘Essentially there are two categories of hydrangeas, there are ones that bloom on old growth and ones that bloom on new growth.” According to the content creator, it is ill-advised to prune your hydrangeas any later than autumn but instead wait until spring. ‘Once they bloom on new growth, supposedly […] you can cut them all the way to the ground in the spring, and then they come up and will bloom on all that new growth,” she explained. ‘[…] With my old growth hydrangeas, […] once the plant starts to leaf out […] start cutting off deadwood. Old and new blooms should be pruned differently (Image: Getty) ‘If you want to trim back the size of the plant you’re going to do that after bloom.” This advice extends to gardeners caring for endless summer hydrangeas, which should be treated as old blooms, according to the expert. For this variety, the leaves should be left to bloom in the Spring, while anything that fails to green up can be deadheaded. Deadheading instructs the flowering shrubs to stop channeling their energy into producing seeds but instead, ensure that the roots and their foliage develop properly. ‘The endless summer variety, you want to treat it like an old growth hydrangea, because you don’t accidentally want to prune out all of your blooms for this season,” adds @doublecloverfarm. ‘If you cut it all the way back, you’re not going to have any blooms and I’ve done it, I did it.”