- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Hydrangeas are beautiful, but sometimes they don't bloom or even grow.

Today, we're looking at the top hydrangea questions from gardeners.

Also, pineapple lily is an exotic plant that's easy to grow.

Today, we're going to learn all about it.

That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Jim Crowder.

Jim is our local horticulturist.

And Natalie Bumgarner will be joining me later.

Mr.

Jim, always good to have you here.

- Glad to be here, thanks for asking me, Chris.

- This is gonna be a good lesson for all of us, right?

Get a lot of questions about hydrangeas not blooming.

Where do you want to start with that?

- Okay, well, the first thing here, the last four or five years, we've hardly gotten any flowers.

And that has to do with our changing weather primarily.

We're either getting early freezes before the sap has been drawn down out of the wood, and it's destroyed the flower stem, or we're getting warm spells during the winter where the sap is beginning to rise, and then we get a freeze, which causes the stem to die.

So these unusual weather patterns have caused a lot of this total dieback to the ground.

Now, a lot of times the stems are saved, but you lose the flower.

And that has to do primarily with frost, okay?

If we get these warm spells and the sap begins to rise... The flowers are forming right now for next year, okay?

When that bud begins to swell, and you see green, dew gets inside that bud, and then we get a frost which freezes that tissue inside.

The leaf tissue around the outside will survive.

It's thick and has large cells.

But those tiny little cells inside the flower get destroyed.

Leafs out, looks great, doesn't bloom, okay?

So those are the two main reasons that we see that it's not blooming.

Now, another reason is the location of the plant.

If you were gonna grow hydrangeas anywhere in the country, this is the worst place.

- It's the worst place.

- It is the worst place because we have these wide temperature changes.

You go further north where the ground stays cold, they don't bloom until after the frost has passed.

You go further south, we don't have any frost.

They're blooming out in full sun, just happy as they can be.

But here it's a challenge, okay?

So if you're gonna plant one here, the best place to plant it is on the north side of the house or in the shade of a tree, even a deciduous tree, because that ground's gonna be cooler than any place on your property.

So the temperature, it's gonna help prevent that sap from moving upward and help protect it from frost in that early morning sun.

Because if you got frost on that little bud, and the sun hits it first thing in the morning, [pops] you've lost that flower.

So location is critical.

- And so let me ask you something about that.

So our afternoon sun here in the Mid-South specifically is just brutal, right?

- It is brutal, but I can show you some in Bartlett that are protected from the morning sun that bloom almost every year, and they're in full afternoon sun.

Takes plenty of water.

Because everybody will notice that their hydrangeas will droop during the day because- - Yeah, I've seen that.

- They're losing so much water through their foliage and they can't replace it fast enough.

But as soon as the sun goes down, they leaf back out and swell back up.

So it's not really their lack of water, it's just they're processing it so quickly.

Another thing that will help prevent that early-season bud swell is mulching hydrangeas extremely heavy.

Four inches or so is good.

It'll help control that ground temperature and keep it from warming.

I have liked to use through the years cypress mulch.

It's lighter.

It repels a lot of the heat, and ground stays colder longer than it does with black mulch and even pine needles.

So I have moved towards using that around most of my shrubs for that one reason, to keep that bud swell from coming out early in the spring.

Another problem we face here in the Mid-South is leaf diseases on hydrangea.

About mid-summer or so, they start getting it.

A lot of times we can, we think that it's from overhead watering.

You can't stop the rain.

And some people think, well, you can go in there and clean it all out at the end of the year, and it'll be clean.

But those spores are everywhere.

You're not doing a whole lot of good by removing tissue and that sort of thing.

The only thing we can hope for is that we try not to overwater.

If you're gonna water, water early in the morning so that the foliage can dry.

If you're running a sprinkler system that's overhead, let that foliage dry.

And then spray.

If you know you've had a problem, use a good fungicide that'll start.

And there's some real good ones now that you don't even have to spray, you can just drench with.

- Really?

- Yes.

And they will help patrol that.

Tebuconazole and some of those are systemic, even propiconazole.

And they'll go up through the plant and help prevent that.

Now you're gonna have to do it every four to six weeks, but it will help prevent that leaf spot.

But if you're just getting scattered spots on the plant, I wouldn't even worry about it.

Let it do its thing.

If you've lost say 10% of the green tissue on a leaf, that's not, I wouldn't worry about it.

'Cause you're likely going to get it every year, you know?

There are some beautiful ones, but you gotta take care of them to make them do that.

- Right, so it's more cosmetic than anything else.

- It really is, yeah.

Now when you start losing 50% of the green tissue on leaves, then it's affecting the overall health of the plant.

Still not gonna kill it.

But it's healthier to keep that foliage green and let it feed that root system so that you get a bigger and better plant next year.

- Okay.

You know we got to cover this one, right?

So what about pruning though?

Could pruning cause the hydrangeas not to bloom?

- It can quite often.

A lot of people will prune too late in the season.

Like we said, the buds are forming now.

So you don't want to do any pruning now.

The best time to do your pruning is immediately after they flowered and they begin to fade a little bit.

That's the best time to prune them.

Now, I don't recommend shearing.

What I would prefer you do is go in and take out say a third of the oldest canes.

They'll peel a little bit.

Pull those out and then let those replace.

That new growth will have time to mature before we have the hard freezes on it.

The later you do that, the less likely that tissue is to survive the winter.

The reason I don't like to shear them is because you've taken a cane that's say pencil size, your new growth's gonna be even thinner when it comes out.

Now, it'll have buds on it, but it's much more likely to be damaged from the weather than if you had left it alone.

- So we're pruning correctly, right?

We have different varieties.

- Yes.

- So I mean, which?

New wood, old wood?

So you want to talk about that and explain it to us please?

- Most of the hydrangeas that we have seen in the past are what we call mopheads, the big macrophyllas that have huge pink or blue heads, depending on the pH.

Okay, they produce most of their flowers on old wood from last year.

So we don't cut that out even now 'cause you've got buds on it.

So take them out low and take them out right after they bloom.

Sacrifice some of those dried flowers and let them flush back out.

That's the healthiest, best way to help preserve your flowers and prune them correctly.

But the newer ones that we're seeing, the PGs, paniculata Grandifloras, like Limelight and all of those, those bloom on new wood.

So you can cut those as low as you want to.

If you leave them alone, they'll kind of make a tree form, but the stems get smaller, the flowers get smaller.

You'll have a lot of them.

I've trimmed them tree form just to shade other things.

But if you really want the most spectacular color, take them back to 12, 15 inches tall in January.

Cut them hard back.

- You can do that?

- You can do that.

In fact, I've got one in a container that I grow, a dwarf one called Little Pinky.

And it was like five feet tall, and I took it back to four inches.

And right now it is spectacular.

Huge flowers on it.

You'll get your biggest flowers by cutting it back hard.

Now, my wife likes to see those at the end of the season.

So we leave them as long as she'll let me, and then we cut them off, we cut them back.

- So she's the determining factor.

I got you.

- Absolutely.

This Friday I'll be married 50 years, so I know how to listen.

[both laughing] - I see you do.

How about that, okay.

So let me ask you about this too, right?

When should you fertilize your hydrangeas?

Does it matter?

Do they like acidic soils?

- Okay, well, hydrangeas are quite adaptable.

If you want, particularly with macrophyllas, if you want blue flowers, then you need to get the pH on down around five.

Six and six and a half towards seven will give you pinkish flowers.

And then your blue flowers, when you get down five or even a little below, and you'll get really pretty deep blue flowers.

Now, with the newer paniculatas, the green and the reds, as they dry, they don't really matter.

They're tough, they'll grow in anything, you know?

And they love full sun.

That's really good.

So it's where you can get the most spectacular flowers, out in full sun.

And we don't see a lot of leaf diseases in them.

They're pretty tough.

I've grown them in pots.

I don't have a place in my garden big enough to grow some of the big ones.

But I think they're absolutely beautiful additions to the garden.

- I would agree with that, Mr.

Jim.

So thank you so much, right?

So those are some of the reasons why your hydrangeas don't grow or don't bloom.

- Right, and hydrangeas, when you go into a nursery, they sell themselves.

They're so beautiful.

- They are beautiful.

- And you just want these, and so you'll plant a lot of them.

And then a lot of times people get disappointed in them because of where they planted them or the unusual weather we've had.

- Location, location, location.

- Absolutely.

- How about that?

Mr.

Jim, thank you much.

Learned a lot just then.

Thank you much.

All right.

[upbeat country music] - In this meadow planting, we're focusing on native plants that will support pollinators.

And if you plant it correctly with a little planning on the front end, you can have blooms from spring all the way through fall.

For example, earlier this spring, we had toadflax, clasping bellflower, we had Lobelia.

As the season progressed, now we're into early and mid-summer, you can see we have a number of different blooms.

One of my favorites is Monarda fistulosa.

This is our native bee balm.

You can see right in front of me, we have wild quinine.

Down at the front of the border, that's butterfly milkweed or a Asclepias tuberosa.

And then of course, you can see also, all behind me is Rudbeckia hirta.

We're not done with blooms.

So we have several different species of plants that haven't even started opening up yet.

Silphiums or rosinweed is a common name for that genus, compass plant and cup plant.

We also have several native sunflower species, some goldenrods, partridgepea, and several others.

If you are strategic on the front end, you can really plan to have continuous bloom and interest, and most importantly, nectar and pollen sources available for our native insects from the very beginning of spring all the way through the growing season.

[upbeat country music] - All right doc, pineapple lily.

And I will confess, I don't know much about pineapple lily.

Mr.

D, you know anything about that?

- I'm looking for the pineapple.

[group laughs] - Well, we have a few pictures.

You look at this and you're like, "Well, the lily, I can see the lily."

- Lily, I can see that.

- What do you mean about the pineapple?

But the first time that you see a picture of the flower, it will completely make sense.

So this is just a small seedling, but when we have a mature plant, we'll actually have the nice bloom stem come up and flowers will just bloom on that stem with a little top knot of actually it's bracts, modified leaves, and it will look like a little flowering pineapple.

- That might help us out, Mr.

D, a little bit, right?

- When it's blooming, it's fairly self-explanatory.

- Could you come back then?

[group laughs] - Well, I mean, we have some great ones in the flower bed.

They were just a little bit hard for me to dig up in front of my house, but I brought some pictures.

So we have some good images.

You can kind of see what this looks like in full bloom.

- Alright, well, tell us a little bit about the pineapple lily.

- So this is Eucomis, which is the genus name.

And these are actually a bulb.

Obviously, they're in the lily family, related there.

And they're actually native to South Africa.

So they are from some of the various regions down there.

And there are several species, 10 or 12 of them.

- Wow.

- And so the cool thing about what we have now in this opportunity in horticulture is that they can grow in many parts of our listening and growing area, right?

So they're labeled as Zone 7, you guys are quite safely Zone 7 here, with protection in Zone 6.

But coming from different areas in South Africa, we have the opportunity to bring in some of those different species, crossbreed, and maybe get a little bit better winter hardiness, get a little bit better summer durability.

And so they're something that can perform pretty well in a range of soil conditions.

I have them in my suburban front yard with all the top soil pretty much scraped away.

So as with many things, we say it's not necessarily, doesn't take fabulous soil quality, but we need good drainage.

You can kill them with winter moisture, would be the best way to wipe them out if that was your goal.

But you introduce them as easy to grow.

And so of course, as horticulturalists, we always twitch a little bit every time we declare anything easy because we know that we ourselves and certainly others are capable of wiping out anything.

But so far these have been pretty low maintenance and consistent in the flower beds.

I work with a local gardener in Knoxville, and so this is where some of these crossbreeds are coming from.

And so this is actually a cross of a couple of different species.

And so we're kind of evaluating seedlings, looking at flower shape and color and lots of the variability.

One of the fun things about working with a plant that is, I mean, it's in trade.

You can go out and buy Sparkling Burgundy and different kinds of Eucomis, but it's not a hydrangea, right?

It's not a petunia that we've been growing for a very long time.

And so there's still opportunity to make crosses and see different types of things.

And so that's one of the things we're excited about with sharing with gardeners in Tennessee, some of the opportunities for gains there.

- What about shade tolerance?

- Which is another one of the interesting things that we're looking at and hoping to gather information as more people are growing it across Tennessee.

So in most of our gardens in Knoxville, we tend to grow it in the full sun.

It can handle quite a bit of sun.

But as we think about moving westward, warmer conditions- - Especially this way.

- We may get to the point where we say, "Well, if you're growing it in Memphis, a little bit of shade is certainly fine."

You think about a little bit of afternoon shade.

And so we're interested in performance across shade.

We want to do some trials to kind of see what it does under different levels of shade, but also the fact that we may have some plants that really perform well with a little bit more sun.

And what about the leaf color?

This we see a little bit of purple on here, but sometimes the coloration, both in our stems and our leaves, the depth of that color can vary depending upon the sunlight that we give them.

There's some well-known cultivars that are completely purple in their leaves.

And lots of times, we know when we think about purple leaf trees, lots of different things, how vibrant that color is can depend on light levels.

So there are lots of opportunities to learn, in different geographical areas, how these perform.

Cool things about the flowers.

They have a long flower life and they can actually be used as a cut flower.

So when we drop the petals, the ovaries actually stay present.

And lots of times, they'll be purple and pretty as the plant ages.

Really start to look kind of pineapple-like as we start to see that seed set.

So long vase life and some interesting opportunities there for a tropical looking plant that can survive in most of the climates that we work with here in Tennessee.

- You think you'd like that, Mr.

D?

- Yeah.

Does it taste like a pineapple?

[group laughs] - Well, you know, I don't think that I've eaten any.

But some of the interesting genetic variability has a lot to do with plant height.

So some of the cultivars that are available on the market can be very compact, really deep ruffled leaves, can be great container plants.

- Okay, I was gonna ask you about that.

- Whether you want to protect them a little bit during the winter, if we're in colder climates, or you'd just rather have a compact container plant there, there are some opportunities for a lot of range in sizes, shape, leaf color, stem color, flower color.

- How long before you can get a bloom though?

- Well, it kind of depends on if you started from division or from seed.

So this is actually a seedling, and it will not be blooming this year.

But sometimes if we divide, we may be able to get a late bloom that year that we divide.

And those are some of the things that we're thinking about as we make evaluations for some of our crops as well.

How fast does it clump?

How quick can we get divisions and how fast can we get to a bloom?

And some, every once in a while, we might even see a rebloomer in the fall.

- That's pretty cool.

Another question though.

What about pest problems, disease problems?

- So far, we really haven't had a lot of insect damage.

Some of the other things that we haven't seen a lot of issues with so far are deer damage.

That's one of those things that we never make broad statements about deer resistance.

We say general things like, "Seems to not be highly attractive to deer feeding."

- Deer won't eat it, we don't say that.

We don't say that.

- Right, we never say that.

But we have been growing these in areas where there are certainly deer populations, and this hasn't been one of their early hits, right?

- If you want to check that out, plant them out at Agricenter because we've got plenty of deer.

- Yeah, plenty of evaluation spots.

- Right out by Chris's office.

- Yeah, plenty of deer.

No problem with that.

Well, Dr.

Natalie, we thank you much.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

- I appreciate that.

Learned a little bit about that pineapple lily, Mr.

D.

- Tropical plant that's an opportunity for us.

- All right, there you have it.

Thank you, Doc, we appreciate that.

[upbeat country music] - Well, all of the flowers that we planted seem to be doing very well, all three kinds.

But we noticed that there are some that have got long shoots on them and are kind of leggy and we would like for them to bush out.

So now's the time.

I know you might, a lot of people will have a hard time doing this because you end up cutting off some flowers, but it's best to cut them back, head them back at this time, and then they will branch out and be prettier.

And you want to cut them back to another joint where a leaf comes out so you don't leave any empty stubs.

The key to good pruning is to know that you were never there.

So you prune so it doesn't look like you ever pruned it.

Now all the long branches have been headed back and the plants will each try to bush out and become more beautiful.

[upbeat country music] - All right, here's our Q&A segment.

Y'all ready?

- Yeah.

- These are some interesting questions.

Here's our first viewer email.

"Why didn't my new alliums bloom?"

And this is Sal from Washington, DC.

She says she's also wondering if she needs to dig up the bulbs and save them for next year.

So what say you, Mr.

Jim?

- Okay, alliums are quite hardy, so no.

There are two issues that it could be.

My first thought was that they're too deep.

Normally you want to plant a bulb about one and a half to two times the depth of the bulb.

So if the bulb is two inches tall, you want to put the base of it down around four to five inches.

And if you get it too deep or your soil's too heavy, that can be an issue for it blooming.

And then you brought up the fact that they might be too shallow.

So that can also be an issue.

If the soil warms early, you've got that flower bud that's already in there.

It can come up and be destroyed.

And then the other thing that can occur, you don't need to dig them up, but if you saved, if you bought those bulbs and weren't ready to plant them and put them in your refrigerator, any ripening fruit in there that releases ethylene gas is gonna kill that flower bulb and bud inside that flower.

So we see that a lot with tulips and things like that where people will buy them early and store them for 14 weeks or so before they plant them, and they had an apple in there, and none of them flower.

So you have to be very careful about storing them.

But no, I think the issue is it's either too deep or too shallow.

- Or too shallow, yeah.

All right, Ms.

Sal, thank you for that question.

I hope that answers that for you.

Appreciate that.

Here's our next viewer email.

"Why did my columbine plants bloom a different color this year?"

And this is Greg from Massena, New York.

He says, "Last year, the plant's first year, "they bloomed blue.

This year they bloomed yellow."

So what do you think, Peter?

What happened?

- Genetics.

- Genetics?

- Yes, so columbines are fascinating plants when it comes to the genetics of them.

So a columbine plant will live for two to three years, and then it will die.

But in the process of living for two or three years, it's produced flowers, seeds, and so you have another generation that comes up.

But columbines are very, very good at hybridizing with themselves in the wild.

And so you have the native American columbine, you have the European columbine.

They're both over here now.

They hybridize with each other all the time.

They hybridize with themselves.

And so whatever you have that's coming off those plants as seeds is gonna come back a different color.

What color it is, is up to the genetic lottery.

But they've identified, I think it is 35 different genes that affect color.

And so if you think back to high school biology here, sorry, it's high school biology, but you have, if you think about blue eyes and brown eyes, that was just four options off of two genes.

They have 35 genes.

So you can think of the massive numbers of options for colors that you have there.

So the children are not going to come back as the same color of the parent.

They're just not going to.

Now, there is the Eastern columbine will come back true, and that is the native columbine.

But if it hybridizes with anything else, it's gonna be something else.

- It's gonna be something else.

I would enjoy it a different color.

Mr.

Jim?

- Absolutely.

I plant a lot of the, it's the Pinky series 'cause they're double flowers, and I've seen that.

The one I planted was a deep purple.

I've got some now they're black almost.

I get a red one every now and then.

So it's just, like you say, genetics.

Thank heavens we all don't look alike.

- Right, right.

So we're all different, right?

- Yeah, so the ones you're seeing that are yellow are not the ones you planted.

They're seeds from the ones you've planted.

- And to your point again, they're short-lived perennials.

Right.

You may be able to get four years out of it, but yeah, they're short-lived.

Oh, for sure.

Greg, just enjoy that.

Enjoy the color, all right?

We appreciate that question though.

So Peter, Mr.

Jim, learn a lot, don't we?

- Yeah.

- It's good.

Thank y'all so much for being here.

- Thank you.

- All right.

Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is questions@familyplotgarden.com.

And the mailing address is Family Plot, 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee, 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

We are always talking about Extension on the show.

That's because every county in the country has local Extension agents who are there to answer your questions and give gardening advice for your area.

I'm one for Shelby County, Tennessee.

The best part about Extension, this service is free.

Look them up online and give them a call.

They'd love to hear from you and answer your questions.

Be sure to join us next week for the Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]