update on this bad boy. I noticed this weekend that this poor thing was not doing so well. Some of the branches started to droop and some of the living flowers completely died and fell off. A quick touch of some branches showed that they were mushy...i moved into action and quickly got it out of the soggy soil and into new drier and better draining mixture soil. i also clipped off more of the damaged branches. Am I too late in noticing its poor condition? is it done for? is there anything i can do to revive it? nurse it back to health?

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

Hi Pam and anyone else interested, After my last posting, we had a very high wind come up for about an hour. It blew some branches and clumps of leaves down all around our area, but no rain. It also blew down a large piece of wood that may have frightened the baby, but for whatever reason, the little bird went back under the fence to outside of our yard, and the parents seemed to keep him there this time. In fact, he quite moved on from being squenched up next to the fence, and I could not see him any more with a quick check, but I did hear him answering his mother, and the parents kept coming back and were in different trees to watch after him. They were actually in the trees they perched in to watch their original bluebird home, about 10 feet closer to the front of the house than they had been through this ordeal in our fenced back yard. This morning when I got up, the bluebird parents were not there nor was he. The parents did come back a couple of times when I was outside and did not seem distressed. They did not seem to be calling to him at all. I didn't hear them sing or call any at all. The trees they were sitting in as I mentioned before were closer to the front of my yard and I cannot see the birds from my back deck with binoculars like I could when they were looking after him in the shed. I didn't want to stay too close to see and frighten him into running again, so I missed seeing if they were going down and feeding him, if they had encouraged him to fly and if he did, or anything at all. All I know is that by about 10:00 a.m. when I went around to sit on my little concrete bench which is about 15 feet from the bluebird house, the mom and dad sat in the tree there where they always looked after their home like they were communing with me. Lol. I did hear what I know was some kind of baby bird high in the trees in my neighbor's yard right next to this area. Since I have not heard a baby bird calling from that area throughout this weekend, I'm just going to believe that it was him and that he was able to fly and get up there with his parents calling him at some time that I didn't see. He could almost fly the day before, so I'm hoping that they get him moved down the block to the little field where they moved and where his siblings are. I hope they bring all their babies back to see me some day the way another bluebird family did a couple of years ago. I'll try to let you know if I see all 5 of the babies some time, but there are lots of bluebirds around here, so it may be hard to tell. Last week, there was a whole family of about 7 bluebirds on my roof for about 30 minutes. Karen

** They catch bugs with their beaks, not their feet.** I sure hope this was meant to be informative and not sarcastic. I know they catch bugs with their beaks but they totally need their feet for dropping down and landing properly to catch that bug. A bluebird is a drop feeder as they perch and watch for bugs then drop down and catch them (yes, with their beaks). This one will probably miss a few as it will have to concentrate on how it is landing too and not just on grabbing that bug. Slower bugs should be fine but anything fast may get away from it. Hopefully too by the time they migrate it will have all the issues worked out and be ok wherever it goes for the Winter. Donna