Hydrangea Cuttings

In early May, I trimmed some of my oakleaf and bigleaf hydrangeas to shape them. I knew I’d be sacrificing blooms on the bigleaf hydrangeas, but I wanted them to fill out more and decided it was worth it. Then I decided to plant a bunch of cuttings from the clippings.

The oakleaf cuttings didn’t take, likely because squirrels kept digging in the pots disturbing any forming roots. Below are pictures of the cuttings in early July, after they started putting on new growth. One of them even bloomed, which surprised me. You can see many of them were planted quite close to each other. Now it’s August and I figured they’d had enough time to develop and it was time to give them more space.

Here they are, repotted with plenty of room to grow. A few of them had minimal roots when I transferred them, mainly because I had planted them way too close in the first place and teasing them apart damaged some of the roots. I was a bit hasty when I decided to plant them on a whim and I’m surprised at how well they’ve done. In the end, I got ten cuttings that developed. We’ll see how many survive repotting.

I didn’t label the cuttings, but they’re all bigleaf hydrangeas from 4 or 5 different plants. I know a couple of them are rebloomers, meaning they bloom multiple times throughout the season. One of the varieties is white, possibly only one of the cuttings that took. I’ll find out when they bloom next year.

I added two new cuttings as well. They’re in the smaller purple containers and you’ll notice they have larger leaves since they just came off of the larger plant. The others dropped the mature leaves and started developing new ones. With the new cuttings, I scraped the bottom of the stems and dipped them in rooting hormone before tucking them into the soil. I decided to give them an extra boost since they wouldn’t be growing as vigorously at this time of year. I added these cuttings because this unique variety has overlapping petals and I hadn’t taken cuttings of this one earlier. I consider it one of my favorites.

This last photo shows a couple other pots with clippings of a huchera from my neighbor. One of the three cuttings is developing baby leaves. The other two seem to be surviving but I’m not sure how well they’ll do. None of them had any roots with the cuttings. I’m so glad to see the baby leaves on the one and I’m hopeful for the others.