yg / Mimi / Janice: Thank you for input & Janice I'll tell you what I did to keep this plant alive over the winter, but first: 1) I agree with you yg, I do believe what I've got is Glowing Embers/Alpengluhen. I've gone to umpteen sites to verify & it sure looks like you're correct :-) 2) Thanks Mimi for taking a stab at helping me ID this. 3) Janice: You're probably going to not believe this, since you say you've had no success over-wintering your hydrangea...but here's the whole story--maybe more than you want to know...lol The lady took the plant out of it's pot because it was too heavy for her to transport to my house--I also got the rest of the dirt in another trash bag & the big plastic pot it had been living in. She lives in an apartment so she had no intention of planting it outside. Now, this will probably really "bug" you...I left the plant in the trash bag for I can't remember how many weeks and the darn thing looked just fine. I thought it was a hibiscus plant, and though I've nothing against them, I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep the plant. So...there it sat for weeks in the bag. Every now and then I poured some water over the dirt/root ball. I finally felt guilty of how I was treating it, and JAMMED it into a container I had close by--the same container you see in my photo above. It sat in the garage and only ocassionally did I water it. This plant must be a wonderfully hardy cultivar because it was starting to throw out buds in February--and it was still in the dark garage! I have been wrestling with whether to put it into a nicer & larger container (I'm becoming very addicted to container gardening and beautiful looking containers), or to put it in the ground. But I'd better make my mind up very soon as our weather is getting hotter each day and I know this plant can't stay cramped like this much longer. (I'm watering it twice a day now as it is.) There...that's my secret Janice . Maybe you've just been trying to over-winter less hardy varieties. I see you're in Zone 7, so your temps certainly are quite similar to mine year round. Claudia P.S. I LOVE this plant :-)

The plant blooms on old wood. That means that the flower buds were developed last Fall and would have bloomed this spring. Something happened during this time that made the plant not develop any buds or killed the flower buds. The most common reason is actually improper pruning. If you prune the plant AFTER the buds have developed then you effectively cut off this year's blooms. I recommend not pruning it from August until after it blooms in spring. Another common reason is weather issues. If the plant breaks dormancy and you get a cold spell then this could kill the flower buds. The same thing can happen in the fall when the plant has not gone dormant and you get a cold spell. For example, this year, I had limited blooms in my plants because of fall weather issues. Luis

My first Hydrangea is now in the ground for more than 25 years. At this point, I keep it for sentimental reasons only. It's gotten so THICK with canes that if I wrap it in my usual cage, I have to get everything so tight in there that I think I may actually be suffocating the plant. I've not had good luck overwintering it in recent years. This past winter I didn't even bother with it. If I were you, I'd consider taking a cutting or digging out a portion of your sentimental one and essentially start over. It would indeed be the same plant, so you could keep your sentiment. But I can understand sentiment. I should get rid of my first Hydrangea, but I'm not. For a long time I would cut back the old canes completely to the ground in the Fall. I'd only leave canes that had shot up from low points on the canes or from the crown. They would have grown all summer and would end up giving me great flowering the next year. I'd have very long stemmed flowers, too, that I had cut. The big problem with this technique is that you end up with weaker stems than you would otherwise and next summer they'd be weighted down to the ground with their flowers. I've found that, for my zone, I can usually prune as hard as I want up until about Fourth of July, just to be easy to remember, and not hurt the flowering potential for next year. After that, the buds start setting for next year and you start running into that problem. (But then I've cut some "nikkos" back to the crown in the Fall and on some I'd get great flowering and on some I'd get none. Do I really understand this? NO.) So, here is another method for you to consider to keep it smaller, at least in height. Another thing I've experimented with is to prune all the wimpy growth completely out and just end up with a few stout canes over time. This was interesting, but you end up with an artifical looking Hydrangea and the few stout canes start looking rather strange. But with this technique, more or less, you could develop a plant that wasn't so crowded. I don't know though. I wish I could help you more. I'd like an answer to the question you have, too! Hay

July 14, 2016, z4: I live in West Central MN, z4, have had an Endless Summer, Twist & Shout, planted on East corner of house since summer of 2011 (5 yrs at time of this writing). It gets full sun in morning, a little dappled sun in afternoon for a very short time, rich soil, moist conditions, landscape fabric covered with wood mulch, no turf or other nearby vegetation to compete with. This should be perfect Hydrangea conditions, and while this plant has been robust and healthy from the very beginning, it does NOT get anywhere near its advertised size. (Label that came on my plant says 4 to 5 ft tall and wide.) It dies back completely to the ground every winter so growth starts all over, from ground level, every spring, rather late in the spring, and reaches its maximum size of 2 ft tall X 3 ft wide in mid July. This also means it blooms only on new growth. Though it's advertised as blooming on both new and old growth, there is no old growth that survives the winter for blooms to grow on. I do not cut it back in the fall....don't touch it at all.....and leave the old growth until the following season. In the spring, I clean up the dead and fallen leaves from the year before but leave the old stems standing. (I started leaving the previous year's dead stems through the following spring beginning from the time I planted it, always hoping that, if given enough time, they'd come to life and be that "old growth" that would give the plant that bigger size and more flowers. I've given up that idea, but it's just a habit now. It's become one of those, "This is how I manage this plant because I know it does no harm" , kind of things.) Once the new growth is nearing the height of the previous year's stems, I simply break the old ones off as close to ground level as I can without disturbing new growth, usually ending up to be 3-4 inches above ground level, completely hidden by the new growth. Because they're "dead", the old stems just snap off by hand, very easily, and those few inches that may be left behind have fallen into the soil by the time late fall arrives and the plant once again goes into dormancy, has shed its summer foliage, and everything that was living that summer dies back completely over the coming winter. Over the summer and early fall, it usually has up to 12 blooms at any given time, depending on how much TLC it gets. Blooms range in size from 3" to 7" across (older blooms). Each flower lasts a long time. As far as the color of the flowers, some years they are more on the purple side, some years they are a bit more pinkish. Most years, there's an interesting mix of both colors on each individual flower, often times starting out more on the pink side but changing to purple with a smattering of pink as the blooms mature to full size. I don't know how the plant determines, but it does so on its own since I do NOT amend the soil with anything to change the PH level or influence the bloom color. All I do as far as feeding is give it a drink of water soluble "Bloom Booster" fertilizer (10-52-10) three or four times during the summer, beginning around July 1 (when the plant is nearing its full size and focusing most of its energy into putting on new blooms), and ending the end of August, at the latest. I tried giving it a balanced fertilizer beginning earlier in the season and found that it there was lots of green but sparse on flowers and could get rather leggy. This feeding routine seems to give the best results, in my situation, anyway. I'm very fortunate to live in an area of glacier-rich black soil (black gold!) where pretty much EVERYTHING I've ever planted in my 40 yrs of gardening/landscaping grows much larger and faster than what's stated on the labels. I was expecting the same with this Hydrangea, that its mature size would be greater than its label indicated, so I gave it plenty of room, which is doesn't come close to filling. I've decided to transplant it either this fall or next spring (depending on what I find on the internet for info on how it will stand up to fall transplanting in my zone, which I've not yet found). I think I'll put a Black Lace Elderberry bush in the vacated spot and move the Twist&Shout Hydrangea further down the east side of the house, next to a large bunch of established White Phlox just about to break into beautiful full bloom this time of year. That's my only disappointment with this Hydrangea, its ultimate size. According to my experience, it will never reach the size stated on the label in zone 4, where it dies back to the ground every winter and comes back from ground level every spring. An attractive and, so far, hardy zone 4 plant, to be sure, but not nearly as large as some other varieties in the Hydrangea family, and the larger size is what I was wanting when I bought the Twist and Shout.