Is it possible to leave the fallen tree with the hydrangea still growing on it?..might be pretty when the hydrangea leafs out..

Without being able to see the situation up close and personal, it is difficult to say - sorry :-( Was any of the hydrangea's root system dislodged when the tree fell? If so, you might be able to remove the majority of it but you would still need to be able to carefully pry the lower portion of the climber away from the tree trunk. In fact, the ability to do anything with it hinges on how well you can separate that attachment.

btw, if you can successfully separate the hydrangea from the tree, you don't really need to move it. Climbing hydrangeas are easily grown without a support system in place, but the effect will be more of a large mounding, sprawling flowering shrub-cum-groundcover rather than a climber.

Ooooh.......good idea!!

One of my concerns would be that if the Hydrangea's root ball is up in the air along with the tree's root ball that it is really exposed and may dry out or be subject to freeze/thaw cycles or even air temperatures that are colder than the ground would have been were it still planted. I would recommend that you at least follow tsugajunkie's suggestion to detach it from the trunk and if the ground is not thawed enough for planting, then heel in the Hydrangea's root ball using a mound of anything soil-like such as a mix of old mulch with potting soil and sand to protect the roots. Since climbing hydrangeas take a while to develop enough maturity to bloom, I think it would be well worth trying to save this plant and replant it somewhere when the weather is warm enough for the ground to thaw.

Protect the roots first until the weather warms up.. Then evaluate the possibilities. I wonder if you could leave it, planted where it is and stretch it towards one of the two streets that are nearby standing so it will climb them?

Yes, protect the roots. The more I look at the the pic, the more I agree with Babs in that it looks like a lot of the hydrangea's roots are in the uplifted pine's root ball. If that is the case and if the pine needs to go soon, you may have to do some judicious cutting, hacking and/or digging into that root ball. A lot of work but a 40 foot climbing hydrangea would be well worth the effort, if it were mine.

tj

Needs to be gotten back in the ground promptly. You will probably have to cut the top off and start the plant over, from the crown.

Thank you all so much! Any advice on how best to protect the root ball? Its been exposed like this for a month now. Too late?

Give it a shot regardless. As I said above, "heel in the Hydrangea's root ball using a mound of anything soil-like such as a mix of old mulch with potting soil and sand to protect the roots." Heeling in is basically burying roots temporarily. So remove as many roots as possible and set on the ground if frozen, in a hole if you can dig, and then cover roots well with a several inches of whatever you can find that is sort of soil-like. I wouldn't use just bagged potting mix, but a combination that includes some coarser materials like shredded bark mulch mixed with potting mix might work. It should be well-draining but hold some moisture, and be heavy enough to not blow away (hence the suggestion to mix in some sand.) Water enough to make it damp throughout when you mix it, and then water again when you use it to make it settle around the roots.

Oh, wow. It has been a month? I thought it was something that happened recently. Well, regardless, I would still protect the roots and see what happens when warmer temps arrive. If, during warm up, you see some leaf out near the ends of the 40 feet, cut a few small sections to propagate from... just in case. Then stretch leftover CH that used to be attached to the old fallen tree towards the existing two tall trees in the picture to see if it will climb one of those tees instead.

If, during warmer conditions, the shrub does not leaf out at all by May then the plant did not make it. But it usually has such a dense root structure that I am hoping some of it still survived. So if it does not leaf out at all, look for little plants coming from the ground too.

Term is actually spelled "heeling in", of course. Anyway hydrangea still being viable after a month out in the air seems doubtful. And because this plant adheres to supports, will therefore be hard to get off the tree it probably isn't feasible to recover and keep making use of the top. Also you will have to have some other place to place the now liberated - and very clumsy to handle - top attractively. Yet much of the value of it having grown for 40 years will have been lost if you cut the top down, in order to make the rest of the plant portable. I would look at the root situation and decide if I wanted to bother with separating it from most of its own top, as well as the roots of the conifer, and lugging it to a new planting site, digging a big enough hole to spread to roots out, and so on. It might be better to just let the specimen go.

Also when tall conifers in my area topple effects of root pathogens often become visible, making it apparent reduction of the root system by these agents was the cause of the tree no longer being able to remain upright. If it turned out the tree was taken out by something like Honey Fungus for instance then the hydrangea could be infested as well, or some of the fungus might get transported to the new planting site in soil attached to the hydrangea. This would not be desirable.