In my garden Blue Bird is always the first to show full color, but it might be a consequence of a more sunnier location.
Anyway, the timing difference is exactly one week between the two.
"Anyone know of anything that would identify Blue Bird and Blue Wave? "
Nametag :-))

Where is Blue Billow in that heirarchy???

Nametag. I now put two copper tags on a plant and make sure to have at least one tag stuck in the pot, too.

I still don't have a good solution for keeping track of the cuttings I take. The critters will get into them and scatter the cuttings, the soil, and the tags in as many directions as they can.

I should have been a little more specific if it makes a difference. One line is significantly ahead in the expression of the flowering at THIS stage:One is showing the cauliflower stage and the other basically has no signs of a bud developing. I remember it started out this way last year, too, but I didn't focus on them after that to see if this difference in timing carried over to the flowering stage itself.

I will however this year.

I'll do a little research, but I think I remember that Bluebird has petals that sorta don't touch each other or something. I could have remembered that wrong, so don't trust it.

OK, I guess I need to remember Blue Bird before Blue Wave. Easy enough, I see Blue Birds long before I go to the beach and see the Blue Waves.

Thanks.

Hay

hokierustywilliamsbu,
In my garden B.Billow and B.Wave blooms at the same time, but again, it might be a lighting factor.

Hay,
I'm not sure which 'two lines' you are talking about, but this two pictures taken in your garden on 7/21/07 might help.
First is definitely B.Billow and a second, I guess, is B.Wave (assumigly past prime)

"... I think I remember that Bluebird has petals that sorta don't touch each other or something. I could have remembered that wrong, so don't trust it."
You remember it correctly, Bluebird have four spaced/separated petals, while B.W and B.Billow have 4 (sometimes 5) overlaping petals. Also, one of the 4 petals of Bluebird is slightly larger than another three. Not a prominently larger like on Grayswood, but larger nevertheless.
Here is the picture of Bluebird (past prime) where both, separation and elargement clearly visible

P.S. By going thru and comparing pictures from mine and yours garden I figured out that our zonal difference is ...exactly 3 weeks :-))

(This is not from MY garden but a garden that I help out in that Egoct has seen. Many times when I post I will indeed say, "my garden" or something like that just to avoid complicating the conversation.)

I recognize that first picture, and I've always been pretty sure that it's Blue Billow. That's what the owner thinks and it fits with every thing I know about Blue Billow. I overwinter a lot of Hydrangeas, but that Blue Billow stays in the ground and does just great year after year without fail in my zone 5/6. They have been showing color for at least a week and there's a lot of color in the Billows now.

But, that second picture doesn't seem to be in the garden I help with. Are you sure it's from your seeing the garden? I can't place it in the garden and I don't think the timing of your seeing the garden matches the season of the plant you're showing me. (And, when you came, I think I would have been better at having the lawn cut shorter than the picture suggests.)

Blue Billow and the seemingly worthless Endless Summer and a stray Prezioza are the only macrophyllas/serattas that I don't overwinter, so I can't really compare anything else I do overwinter with them.

This has been helpful. Thanks.

Hay

"But, that second picture doesn't seem to be in the garden I help with..."

Eventhough you say so I pretty sure they are from the very same garden because first picture marked as DSCN3170.jpg, second as DSCN3171.jpg and this one

You grow so many hydrangeas that you need a map :-)))))

P.S. Try Tokyo Delight in ground. No wonder it blooms for me without failure, but everyone who got it from me (all over CT) don't complain either. Also, seems like Tiara I got from you displaying the good hardiness so far.

This is curious, egoct.

I still don't think these pictures are from "my" garden. On that day, there were other gardens being toured. Could it be that you went from this garden to another one and that's why the pictures are in sequence, but not from my garden?

Or, could you have put your camera away for a while and then later picked it up again?

The season thing, too. I overwinter all of the lacecaps except for the Blue Billow. Blue Billow is the first to bloom for me. Like I said, it's showing color right now and the mystery lacecaps, presumably Blue Bird and/or Blue Wave, for me, don't really get going on their flowering until later. It just wouldn't make sense for you to have a photograph of the Blue Billows, no doubt mine, in semi-peak bloom while also having another lacecap which looks to my eye like it's past it's prime.

With my photographs I can click on it's properties and get the date and time it was photographed.

Curiouser and curiouser as they say.

I've been overwintering Tokyo Delight. I've got two and I'm happy to try leaving one in the ground. That would indeed be a nice addition if it survived my winters. As it is, I only get Blue Billow and sometimes Preziosa to flower for me outside.

Thanks again. Good talking to you again.

Hay

OK, I have another thought.

I have a vague recollection that MAYBE you had not brought one of your cameras or something and that you were having to delete some pictures from whatever camera you had and that's why you have a set of pictures from the garden I help in and another set of pictures from who knows where. And perhaps that explains why you can have my garden and another garden showing sequence numbers that suggest they were taken in sequence, but it's really just a picture from my garden replacing a picture from, again, who knows where.

Does that make sense?

Possibility? Not that it matters, but it's got me perplexed. I kept looking around today, trying to find some of the scenes you're posting and I couldn't.

Hay

Hi Hayseed, nice to see your posting. Do you have any pictures of your garden, I'd love to see them.

And hey, Hay...How can we explain my roaring success with ES along with the miserable failures? It's doing exactly what I'd hoped...blooms profusely every year with no worries during winter.

I even have it planted in different microclimates...lots of shade, morning sun, afternoon sun, etc. My only failure with it was planting in marginal full sun. No babying during transplantation, lol. Those moved plants shoulda been toast. But, no. I don't do a whole lotta watering, either. Think I watered them maybe 4 times last summer when the whole world was parched.

The only thing I can think is that I've got early stock, but per your message, that might be a red herring.

If I were a "real" gardener, I'd plant more beautiful hydrangeas, but I was going for a no-brainer. Which I got.

So I'm perplexed.

Mr Hayseedman and ergo45, I have been reading old posts about your winterizing of hydrangeas, do you do the heavy winterizing of Blue billow and Blue Wave too? I live in Central Ohio and I have both these plants which I bought thinking they would be winter hardy. I've had them for three years and no blooms yet. The plants come back lovely and green but not on old wood.
Roseberri

lsimms, I've posted some pictures of the garden I help out in over the years. This is my friend's garden and I'm sure you can appreciate that I can't be posting pictures of her garden. I have posted pictures over the years, but the pictures are always isolated pictures of the plants themselves, all with the thought to respect her privacy. She has no problem with any of this, and her garden has been featured many times in some of the gardening magazines. Her work is well known. If you're ever near the North Western part of Connecticut, let me know.

(Do I have any pictures? I've gotten very interested in photography recently and I've got literally thousands of pictures of the garden.)

Roseberri, Blue Billow, for me, in zone 5/6 has never failed to bloom profusely for me. Never. I've been working with some for as long as 20 years and they always bloom. I know they've done the same for a couple of friends in slightly colder zones. Like a real 5. I haven't had the same luck with any of the few other Hydrangeas I've tried to leave out. I don't know that I've put Blue Wave to a good test, so I can't be 100% sure about saying that it probably wouldn't work for me. I'm surprised that you're not seeing blooms from Blue Billow.

I'm another person who has not had any luck with Endless Summer. I can't figure it out. I bought some of the very, very first ones, and some over the years from all sorts of sources, so I really doubt that I've only gotten mislabeled plants.

I think, for whatever reasons, I am right on the edge of the zones that will allow Endless Summer to work. Right on the edge of the zone that will allow almost any of the Hydrangeas to really work. Egoct lives just down south of me and quite clearly has all sorts of Hydrangeas that do quite well for him. I've seen it in other instances. Less than an hour away, as far as Hydrangeas blooming, the difference is like night and day. It's not a matter of degree. Go one hour South and you get great blooming. But where I am, it's zilch. I think that may also be a reason that lsimms gets great flowering. Her garden, I think, is perhaps closer in climate to egoct's than mine. It's a small difference from mine, just like egoct's, but in the world of these Hydrangeas that seems, to my eye, to make a world of difference. For me the plant will mostly get killed back to the ground each year. But sometimes I get lucky and the plant is not entirely killed back and I'll get some blooming. Again, just on the edge of its hardiness in that regard and just enough on the edge that, for most years, I get very little of that initial bloom from the "old" wood.

I was just scanning one of the threads about Endless Summer being a bust and it seems to me that the ones posting great success were, from what I could see, all posting from zone 7 or higher. Zone 6 is iffy, and zone 5 is a bust. My plants almost always die back to the ground each winter and you might think that with an Endless Summer, one that is supposed to bloom on new wood, that wouldn't matter, that there would be plenty of time to develop a flower, but it just doesn't work out.

Someone used to post here from someplace like Mississippi and would show these great pictures of a reblooming Endless Summer. Wow!!! There is definitely something different about the plant in that environment. She posted pictures and you'd see all these flower buds developing along leaf axils of the new growth. I can't get even a terminal flower blooming and she's posting pictures in which after the terminal flower blooms and she deadheaded it, the remaining stem sends out buds all over the place.

I have a suspicion that the sun plays an important role in all this, but I don't know exactly how. None of mine are in serious full sun and I wonder about that. Right now, I get more sunlight hours than someone in Mississippi. Could that be a factor? (It'd be interesting to me to know what these plants would do in a place like Juneau, Alaska that is getting close to 18 hours of sunlight a day right now. Would more sunlight hours mean better or worse flowering for ES?

I'll let you know if I figure it all out. I've rambled a bit in this post. Hope it all makes some sense.

Hay

Re: sun and ES reblooming ability.
I have 4 major groupings of ES+B.Bride in a garden.
Three of them are in a part-sun situations and one is in an almost full sun (12am-4:30pm).
First three groups does not show any meaningfull reblooming except few late flowers (Aug-Sept) here and there, but the last group is definitely producing new flowers the whole August and September and still blooming well into October.
To deal with a wilting/frying issue which is inevitable in such situation I created a dedicated sprinkler line for that particular bed only and let it run for 30 min starting at 1pm. This provides so much needed moisture when it needed the most.
Based on this particular 'local' experiment I think that ES is indeed a rebloomer, but to show this quality it need to receive more sun (and heat) than we normaly use to give to hydrangeas.

Wow! thank you guys!

It's been a while since I checked the internet for the latest about Endless Summmer.

This cracks me up. You know how, if you misspell a word in a Google search, Google will try to guess what you meant to say with a question like "Did you mean....". So, I type in "Endless ummmer reblooming" and it asks me, "Did you mean Endless Bummer reblooming".

Well, I guess that's pretty close to what I meant!!

Anyhow, once I got that straightened out, I checked out the Endlesssummerblooms.com and there seems to be more than just we people who are not doing so well with ES in the north.

"Over the last two years we have heard some reports of inconsistent flower production, especially in cooler climates. Although a number of factors may contribute to the consistency or inconsistency of blooms, there is no simple answer to this matter. Here are some steps consumers in cooler northern climates can take to help ensure beautiful blooms.

1. Location
Location, location, location! Yes, that old saying is true. In Northern climates, the location of your hydrangea in the garden will have the largest impact on bloom production. The farther north you are, the more sun your plants can tolerate. In zones 4-5a we recommend planting your Hydrangeas in a location that enables them to receive at least 6 hours of sun with some dappled shade in the afternoon."

They don't exactly say that this is going to be fixing the problem, only that they recommend doing it.

Endless Bummer?

Hay