I love hydrangea, as you’d realize immediately if you stepped into my living room, where I have a big bouquet of dried ‘Pinky Winky’ on the mantle (its flower heads, shown in the photo, are about ten inches long!) and a lovely arrangement of dried some-other-kind-of-hydrangea-that-for-some-reason-is-dyed-maroon atop a mahogany desk, where it admirable accents the reddish hues of the wood. (Gad, that sentence makes me sound like some sort of warped interior designer, doesn’t it?) I have four different hydrangea bushes, and I love the way the dried flowers look indoors. But I was never sure if I was cheating myself of more blossoms next year if I went ahead and pruned this year’s away.
So … I looked up the care instructions that came with my ‘Pinky Winky’ a few years back (okay, okay–I accidentally came across them while I was cleaning up a pile of papers that’s been on my end table since 2007), and there my answer was! Hydrangeas bloom on new wood, so if I want more flowers, I actually NEED to cut this year’s blossoms and display them in my living room.
Now I have two big vases of cut hydrangeas, one on either end of the mantle, and I must tell you, they look dynamite!
Photo courtesy of Proven Winners®, http://www.provenwinners.com.
Lavender & Larkspur 
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