Endless Summer® Blushing Bride Bigleaf Hydrangea

Hydrangeas are the stars of the summer garden and there are so many wildly colored varieties to consider. But you'll always adore the crisp, classic good looks of the Endless Summer® Blushing Bride® Hydrangea PP 17,169 (Hydrangea macrophylla 'Blushing Bride'). It's a sophisticated standout that you'll never grow tired of.

Use these mid-sized, upright rounded shrubs as the backbone of your summer garden. Add them to containers and use them as low-flowering hedges. They'll look great all by themselves, and easily hold their own next to other accent plants.

They look so fresh and cool in the heat of summer!

Blushing Bride is a lovely shrub that produces an abundance of soft, rounded, semi-double blooms up to 8 inches across. The beautiful pure white blooms have a lush appeal and contrast perfectly against the deep, dark, green foliage. Long, strong, sturdy stems hold the blooms aloft so they can shine for your summer.

As the flower color matures, it will slowly transition into either a light blush pink or soft Carolina blue, depending on your soil pH. Like other macrophylla, you can control the color by adding alkaline garden lime for pink and aluminum sulfate for blue blooms in more acidic soil. Either color is spectacular, pastel, and subtle.

Endless Summer® Blushing Bride Hydrangea could be the perfect plant for cutting gardens to create gorgeous centerpieces. Adorn your life with these beautiful blooms. You'll have plenty of these pure white flowers with semi-double florets arranged in large rounded mophead flowers to add to fresh arrangements. Let them transition and dry on the shrub to be harvested for dried arrangements in fall and winter.

Add plenty of the sturdy stems to your vase first, then tuck in other blooms for color and texture. They'll make the most tender partner for the graceful Rose or use them as a unifying touch in a hot combination of bright prairie plants or annuals.

Life is short! Play around and have fun with your arrangements. Last-minute guests? Trim 2 or 3 stems and pop them in a vase all by themselves for an effortlessly chic style.

This shrub is an Endless Summer® selection, which was a truly breakthrough series. You'll have early blooms that grow from last year's wood. Later in the summer, the new growth from this year will rebloom for you.

This means that Blushing Bride Hydrangea blooms on both old and new wood! Your landscape will have a consistent flowering backdrop. You'll appreciate counting on the flowers year after year.

There are so many ways to enjoy this beautiful Blushing Bride throughout your landscape. They are the perfect container thriller plant to decorate your patio or pool deck.

How to Use Endless Summer® Blushing Bride Hydrangea in the Landscape

Give these precious plants protection from the hot afternoon sun. This is especially true in the hottest USDA growing zones of 7, 8, and 9.

If your house faces east, you can use a row of these flowering shrubs as a very modern foundation planting. They look incredible as a low hedge near a covered patio or planted en masse along the edge of a woodland garden.

Use them to fill the center of a Boxwood-lined planting bed. Or plant them on the sunny side of taller Yew and Holly shrubs. That evergreen backdrop really sets the stage for the large blooms.

Like other Hydrangea, Blushing Bride is outstanding in your cutting garden and incorporated into your perennial border. They look amazing when repeated along the middle or front of your mixed shrub borders.

Try running them along the length of your white picket fence for an elegant take on classic Americana. Or, plan a monochromatic, repeating planting pattern, alternating Blushing Bride and White Knock Out® Roses. Add interest and fragrance with Spice Baby® Koreanspice Viburnum or Marianni® Daphne. Mix up your bigleaf Hydrangea collection with the colorful Summer Crush Hydrangeas and other Endless Summer white Hydrangea shrubs!

Space them 2-2 ½ feet apart for a tight, low hedge. You'll measure from the center of one plant to the center of the next. Create zig-zagging rows for mass planting. Mulch between and keep new mass plantings weeded as the plants grow together.

#ProPlantTips for Care

Blushing Bride Hydrangeas love an evenly moist, rich soil that is slightly acidic (lower soil pH). Ideally, this Hydrangea loves to have morning sun and then some partial shade from the hot afternoon sun. They will not flower well if they are grown in full shade, so they do need that morning sun to make the best bloom. An east side of a home or building, or a larger tree is ideal.

Provide rich, well-drained soils for your Hydrangeas. If your soil stays wet after a rainfall, add additional soil in a mound 18 - 24 inches above the native soil. Plant directly in that mound.

Give your plants a regular schedule of moderate water. Use a thick layer of mulch to cover the base of the plant to keep the root system moist. Please pull mulch back away from the stems a few inches to give better air circulation.

Early spring pruning is best done when you can see the start of new growth on these deciduous shrubs. Trim back the flower heads on old stems down to where new sprouts are starting. Reduce any of the branch tips that may have been winter-damaged from the cold.

As the older, thicker stems finish blooming in summer, you may want to remove those old stems out to the ground, leaving the younger stems to push forth the second flush of blooms. Removing the oldest stems after their yearly bloom will easily rejuvenate your plant over time.

In colder hardiness zones, there can be some winter damage. Established plants are best protected like you might a Rose bush by waiting for the plants to go dormant, and then piling up a mound of mulch over the top of the plant by a foot or so. In the late spring, pull the mulch away as the weather warms up. Then prune back any dead tops and it should grow nicely from the covered stems.

Like most Hydrangea bushes, soil acidity will affect the bloom color. The blooms start out white and they will fade to light pink in alkaline soil and light blue in acidic soil, so adjust your soil accordingly.

The mature size of the plants can vary somewhat based on the climate the soil type, and the amount of water available to the plant. They like areas with good air circulation and soil moisture, but not necessarily overhead irrigation. Use drip irrigation when you can to keep the soil moist, but not the foliage.

Enjoy your long relationship with the beautiful Endless Summer® Blushing Bride Hydrangea. You'll fall in love with the high-quality plants from the expert growers at Nature Hills. Order today!