I can't believe this even though I see it - this tiny rooted cutting producing this huge flower head! Plants are amazing.

WOW.... Do you know the name of the plant. There are so many of them out now it it is crazy.

Have no idea what it is .. I'm thinking it might be one of the 'Mop Head' varieties. I got the cutting last year with a deep dark navy blue flower on it and rooted it over winter - it had been in a flower arrangement - I was sure it had been dyed and when it bloomed this year it confirmed the dye job - that's the only reason I let it bloom - to see if it was indeed navy blue. Since it's starting to wind down I'll cut off the flower head and let the poor cutting have a rest and spend its energy making more roots and stems rather than flowering.

That is a huge bloom for so little a plant. I'm glad to know you can root hydrangeas from cuttings. I added a number this year and may try taking some cuttings when they grow. All are pretty tiny right now.

I added a few also, hope I get to see big flowers but I have seen them in the stores like that and I thought it was a growth hormone doing that. LOL.

I didn't use any GA on this at all and when I do use it, it's rarely on flower buds. I cut off the blooms yesterday and won't let it bloom again until it's at least three times the size it is now.

I've found rooting hydrangeas can sometimes be tricky .. this one took 3 months to make roots .. though being Fall/Winter with soil temps below 65 degrees may have been a factor. I didn't do anything special .. just stuck it in some potting mix and did not use rooting hormone

I meant the nurseries sometimes use it to make them bloom faster. I think you did good and it will be a beautiful shrub when it is big.

Thanks! GA is a lot of fun if you're careful. I mostly use it for stubborn seeds .. I actually will inject it into the seed with a syringe and needle using 200ppm.

Whoa!!

Wow! Never thought of doing that with a seed. Love your hydrangea cutting. What I do with hydrangea cuttings is just push a few in the ground during the fall and most will root over the winter/ spring. I'm a zone 7 so that works well for me.

It actually works pretty well and in some cases you can bypass double or triple dormancy (as in cold then warm then cold etc.) that way but you don't want to do that to a hard coat seed unless you take the coat completely off first because sometimes they germinate so fast and hard the seed coat never has time to soften up and they literally get squished to death. Sometimes I just soak a paper towel or cotton ball with GA then break the seed coat of non hard coat seeds or remove the 'kernel' from a hard coat and lay it on the GA saturated whatever. That works best for flattish seeds like Luffa.

One thing you must do once they start to germinate is rinse off the seedling in water to remove as much as the GA as you can and put it a non GA treated substrate otherwise can elongate too much and compromise the integrity of the plant as a whole.

Xeramtheum, it might not have been dyed. If you get it in acid soil they turn blue. I have one that was pink when I purchased and when I planted it in my yard because it is around 15 evergreen trees it is a dark blue. Everyone always awww at the color.

I just purchased Forever and Ever Hydrangea and they said it is pink in rich low PH soil if it is planted in acidic soil it is blue. One side of the tag has a pic of the pink flower and the other side has the blue color. Sure enough it bloomed pink but next year it will be blue because of my acidic soil.

I've tried tinkering with soil pH with other hydrangeas using aluminium and ammonium sulfate, pine needles and coffee grounds and never have been able to achieve or get even close to the color intensity that the original flower had. The best I could manage was mottling light blue/pink. When this cuttings gets a bit older and more robust maybe I'll try again.

The picture is the results I got with aluminum sulfate.

I tried to find a pic of the one I had. It was at my old house. Depending on the hydrangrea the intensity of the blue will depend on the hydrangea. The reason I thought you might get that same blue if you changed the PH is because you saw the color of the bloom as a navy blue.

Sometime it may take 3 years of regular applications to get to the desired dark blue but if it is one of the hydrangea that will bloom dark blue it will again.

I'm definitely going to try again once this one gets a bit bigger.

There was one grand old blue Hydrangea here when I moved to this house. I've made numerous propagations from it, given some away, put half a dozen or so in the ground in various places. Some are making mostly blue flowers, but some are pink, within a few feet of each other in one instance. PH is a fickle, mysterious entity!

Although I've had success with cuttings, that's a real PITA compared to layering. If you have an existing shrub, or permission to play with someone's, just bend a branch to the ground and put a rock or brick on it. Not all will do that w/o breaking, but it's usually easy to find a few that will. (Brush aside mulch, remove some grass, whatever is necessary so the branch will make contact with the soil.) No attention needed until it's ready, which would be when all 3 occur simultaneously; it has roots, you have time to dig (and nurture it in the near future if necessary,) you have somewhere to put it.

Another option is to bend a branch to the surface of a pot of soil if you can't find any to bend all the way to the ground. Maybe little more funky on the eyes for a short while, but definitely a viable option, and possibly easier for anyone who has trouble digging, bending all the way down. At least you only have to dig once that way, (the hole for it's new, permanent home.)

Great idea, I just got my first Hydrangea's this year so I will try that when I am ready to propagate. I do hope mine stay pink!