As we are entering the season of spring celebrations, many hydrangeas will take their pride of place as the centerpieces of our Easter brunch table settings. Or as Mother’s Day gifts. Or perhaps as tokens of teacher appreciation before summer break.
And if I’m being honest, I may have gifted some blooming hydrangeas to myself when I didn’t know any better. Who amongst us has never gone to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner and come back with a potted plant … just because?
It’s a nice gesture that undoubtedly seems more sustainable than a bouquet of cut flowers, right? Because it’s a potted plant that will live a long and happy life, right?
Well, maybe. But probably not.
Let me explain why gift hydrangeas die so quickly. And what we can do to (try to) keep these plants alive longer.
What is a gift hydrangea?
This is what I’m talking about.
Do you really think this is a normal growth pattern for a hydrangea?
I’ve also seen them go by many names: florist’s hydrangeas, Mother’s Day hydrangeas, Easter hydrangeas, grocery store hydrangeas or foil-wrapped hydrangeas.
Personally, I think this last moniker is the most appropriate because it’s almost one hundred percent accurate. Gift hydrangeas, no matter when you buy them or receive them, always seem to be wrapped in a plastic sleeve that’s meant to convey “here, I brought you something nice.”
Nursery hydrangeas, grown to go straight into the garden, won’t usually come with all the extra frills.
What’s the problem with gift hydrangeas?
There’s absolutely no problem with them unless (or until) we start imposing our unrealistic expectations on them.
If we’re expecting them to behave as garden hydrangeas, we’ll be disappointed.
If we’re expecting them to behave as houseplants, we’ll also be disappointed.
At best, I’ve learned to see them as temporary houseplants that may (low probability) have a chance at becoming outdoor plants.
Gift hydrangeas have been grown and trained specifically for a single show-stopping bloom. Generally, they have been grown exclusively in a warm greenhouse, as opposed to garden hydrangeas which usually go through periods of cooling to help them adapt to life in the garden.
And they have been fertilized consistently in order to encourage massive flowers much earlier than their garden counterparts.
In a nutshell, all natural processes have been artificially altered in order to present us with a ready-to-gift plant, in full majestic bloom as early as February.
Florist hydrangeas make a gorgeous centerpiece!
Sometimes, they’ll even come in container arrangements with other forced flowers, such as roses or lavender.
Have a look at this gorgeous white display I found at my local garden store. The white hydrangea is matched with white roses, daffodil bulbs, primroses and bellis. Very pretty. Not very long-lasting.
All of this pursuit of instant gratification often comes at the expense of the long-term health of the plant. This type of hydrangea won’t bloom infinitely. But it will also not live very long as a potted indoor plant because all of its energy has gone to putting out flowers, rather than root development or foliage growth.
In the majority of cases, we’ll just have to toss the plant or compost it when it looks worse for wear. But sometimes, it turns into a bit of a heartbreak or personal failure when the hydrangea marks a special occasion, such as a graduation, a new house or the passing of a dear one.
This leaves us with the following two choices.
Should I grow my gift hydrangea as a houseplant?
When I was a teacher, I was known to bring home potted hydrangeas gifted with love by my students. But no amount of love could make up for the fact that I was living in a small apartment with only a couple of windows.
I’ve learned the hard way that growing hydrangeas indoors is not as easy as placing them in a pot on the windowsill.
But it can be done.
Here’s the disclaimer though: do not expect the plants to be in bloom the entire time. It’s not part of their life cycle. The flowers will only last for a few weeks to a couple of months, tops. Once the flowers are gone, cut them off and focus on keeping the plant itself alive.
First of all, hydrangeas are very thirsty plants.
We need to keep them well-watered. But indoors, that may become a problem quickly because we may alternate between underwatering and overwatering them.
If the indoor potted hydrangea dries out too much, it wilts, turns yellow and loses leaves. If it gets too much water, the roots will rot. Followed by, ironically but not illogically, the same signs as above: wilting, yellowing, leaf loss.
The method that I found to work best is to put the plastic pot in the sink, run the water on the soil until it’s fully saturated, then let it drain completely for about half an hour. I then return it to its spot. The trick is to keep an eye on it to prevent it from getting too dry again.
Also, hydrangeas need more light than we can usually accommodate indoors. Place them too close to a window, and they might get too much sun and scorch. Place them a couple of feet away, and they’re not getting enough sun.
Indoor hydrangeas still need to enter dormancy.
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect is this: hydrangeas need a period of dormancy if we want them to bloom again. This is achieved naturally in the garden, but indoors, where we heat our homes in the cold months, we tend to overlook this detail.
So, if yours has made it through the summer months indoors, place it in the coolest room of the house during the colder months. You should also reduce watering over the winter, but don’t let it completely dry out. By this point – usually in late fall – it will have shed all of its leaves. This is normal. It’s still alive. It just needs a nap.
If you decide to keep hydrangeas as an indoor plant, you’ll have to keep all of these factors in mind. And please don’t panic when it loses its flower. That’s a natural part of the growth cycle, which the plant is desperately trying to get back to after being forced to go ahead of it artificially.
And please, whatever you do, do not overreact by fertilizing your gift hydrangea more. Lack of fertilizer is not the source of its struggles.
Can I plant my gift hydrangea in the garden?
Yes, you can. However, the result will vary greatly depending on how warm and humid your gardening zone is.
It would be even better if you could wait to bring out your gift hydrangea until early summer, after the risk of a frost has passed.
In this article, I wrote about my best tips on how to plant a hydrangea that thrives right away. Granted, the article is meant for nursery hydrangeas that go straight into the garden. But the same steps will apply when you transplant gift hydrangeas – including adding some mycorrhizal fungi to the planting site.
But here’s my suggestion: transfer your gift hydrangea straight into the garden only if you can control:
- how much water it’s getting. We cannot forget to water it if it’s too dry in the summer;
- how much sun it’s getting. Hydrangeas do better in partial shade. Gift hydrangeas that have a weak root system cannot handle too much sun.
Another factor to consider is the size of the plant. Generally, gift hydrangeas are compact cultivars that will stay small even once they’re established. So plant them somewhere towards the front of the border, where larger plants won’t upstage them.
An in-between solution for gift hydrangeas.
If you have neither the time nor the energy to baby a forced hydrangea, let me suggest an interim solution: Transplant it outdoors but keep it in a pot for the first year.
The fact that it’s potted will help immensely with the two factors I mentioned above. We’ll be able to control the moisture. We can move the pot to get either more or less direct sunlight, depending on the time of the year. If we’re feeling overly protective, we could even drag the pot to an unheated garage or a sheltered patio to overwinter.
Just make sure you pick a larger pot than the one it came in. It will need more soil and room to grow.
Who knows, you may even decide that you like it better as an outdoor potted plant.
Bonus: It will be easier to change their color.
As a bonus, if you really care about this aspect, growing potted hydrangeas will make it easier to influence the color of their blooms.
If you plant blue hydrangeas in alkaline soil, they will turn pink. Conversely, if you plant pink hydrangeas in acidic soil, they will turn a purpleish blue. This will happen gradually, over the course of a year, not at the flick of a switch.
I explain how to change the color of your hydrangea flowers in this article.
But you should know that white hydrangeas will remain white and will only turn a pleasant shade of green toward the end of their bloom cycle.
Keep in mind that the plant will probably not bloom again in its first year outdoors, whether in a container or the ground.
Ultimately, whether a gift hydrangea survives depends on many factors, some of them out of our control. But give it a chance anyway. I call it my “what do I have to lose?” strategy since this is probably the overarching theme of my gardening method.
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