Twist-n-Shout® Hydrangea

Mop-head hydrangeas are beautiful, there is no doubt, but if you have every struggled to hold them up after a summer rainstorm, you know they are not always easy to grow well. Plus, they are green for quite a long part of the season, often only blooming later in the summer, or earlier but then followed by green leaves. We have an answer for both those problems, with a beautiful hydrangea of the lace-cap type, which has lighter blooms that hold up well in adverse weather. Plus, this great plant blooms continuously, from late spring to fall, because it produces flowers on both old wood and new wood, while other kinds only do one or the other. With this wonderful shrub summer starts early, and never ends until frost finally stops your plant blooming. It’s enough to start you dancing, so no wonder this great plant is called the Twist-n-Shout™ Endless Summer® Hydrangea.

The Twist-n-Shout Hydrangea is a deciduous shrub that grows to 3 feet tall and wide in colder zones, and up to 5 feet tall and the same across, in warmer ones. The younger stems are purple-red, maturing to beige-brown, and the leaves are lush, deep green in color, and about 4 inches long, with a heavy texture and an attractive serrated edge. Even in the short periods when it just has leaves this is a striking and attractive bush. Shortly after the new leaves of older stems expand in spring, you will see a tiny cluster of greenish buds developing. These expand into a head of buds, which by late spring has opened into a large, flat flower-head, measuring 6 inches across. While these heads are developing, new shoots are coming from the base of the plant, which will also produce flower heads when they have grown taller. The flower heads remain effective for a full 2 months, and during that time more will have developed, so blooming is continuous from late spring to the end of fall.

The flower heads of the Twist-n-Shout Hydrangea are of the type called ‘lace-cap’. They contain a central part of almost 400 tiny ‘fertile’ flowers without petals, surrounded by over 20 large, ‘sterile’ flowers measuring 1½ inches across with a tiny button center and 4 flat petals. The effect is of an old-fashioned lady’s hair-cap, made of hand-woven lace. The color varies with your soil type. In alkaline soils the flower-head is gorgeous pink, with the outer flowers paler than the central ones. In neutral to slightly acidic soils they will be purple-pink, and in very acidic soils they will be periwinkle blue.

The Twist-n-Shout Hydrangea thrives in partial shade, so it is ideal for those more shady parts of your garden, in beds on the north side of your house, under trees and in wooded areas. Use it at the back of smaller beds, or in the middle of larger ones, or plant it as an informal edge along a fence, a path, or a driveway. Use it as part of the foundation planting around your home. With its weather-resistant flowers it will always look great without staking or a lot of care. It grows easily in most types of soil, if they are well-drained and not too dry. A steady supply of water for your plant is the secret of keeping it blooming continuously. Mature plants are not very drought resistant, so water regularly, especially during summer and dry periods. Regular fertilizer will help those blooms keep on coming and coming. If you grow this plant in a pot you can control the color by using suitable fertilizers and soil for acid-loving plants to create blue hydrangeas. No pruning is needed – just remove dead stems in spring once new leaves are seen. In colder zones most blooming will be seen on new shoots that develop from the base, if older stems are killed in winter.

The big-leaf hydrangea, Hydrangea macrophylla, originated in China, and early plants with large ‘mop-heads’ have been popular since they were first introduced to Europe and North America. The original hydrangeas flowered on old wood, so they didn’t flower at all in colder areas, and only flowered once in a year in warmer zones. The renowned plant-breeder and educator Dr. Michael Dirr changed all that in 1998, when he spotted a hydrangea in a nursery in Minnesota that was blooming in late summer on the ends of new shoots. He called it the Endless Summer Hydrangea, and it became the foundation of the Endless Summer® series of Hydrangeas. Wanting to add a lace-cap hydrangea to the range, he crossed an older mop-head variety called ‘Penny Mac’, with a lace-cap variety of his own breeding, called ‘Lady in Red’. Among the many seedlings he found one that had beautiful lace-cap flowers, and that re-bloomed on new shoots. He patented it in 2009, as ‘PIIHM-1’, and added it to the Endless Summer range with the trademarked name Twist-n-Shout™. This terrific hydrangea is the perfect way to bring endless blooming to your garden with a low-maintenance shrub that fits perfectly into any style of garden. We expect our stock of this great plant to soon be gone, so order now, as this hot variety is twistin’ off the shelves.