What to do When You See Your Hydrangea Leaves Turning Yellow

Have you ever seen your hydrangea leaves turning yellow mysteriously, even though your plant seems healthy otherwise? Here’s why it happens and the easy fix!

We’re right at the beginning of our late-blooming hydrangea season here, so I thought I’d share a tip for this particular type of hydrangea flower that I found really interesting. A lot of people have a similar issue with their panicle hydrangeas where they start to see the leaves turning yellow and dropping off at different parts of the season and it can be pretty dramatic and pretty concerning because it can happen really quickly on a flowering shrub that seems like it’s otherwise really healthy. I can’t remember where I learned this a few years ago, but it has been such a handy little hydrangea tip. I’ve shared it on Instagram before, but I realized I’ve never told you about this in a real, full blog post, so today I’m taking care of that. 🙂

What is a Panicle Hydrangea?

When I say that this applies to panicle hydrangeas, that means the type of perennial ornamental hydrangea shrubs that typically bloom later in summer, usually around August. a limelight hydrangea is a common type of panicle hydrangea that you may have seen in the past. They have a more cone-like shape to the blooms than the typical smooth hydrangeas or mophead hydrangeas that you might think of first as “classic” hydrangeas. Different types of flowering hydrangeas thrive in different USDA hardiness zones, but here we live in zone 6, they’re quite vigorous growers and they’re really popular in our area, which is great because that means that there are showy white flowers just about everywhere at this time of year.

This type of pure-white hydrangea with lush, dark-green foliage is excellent for cut flowers in a vase during the summer, or to preserve in arrangements using dry hydrangeas after deadheading.

Read more about this type of hydrangea: Planting Panicle Hydrangeas Successfully

Why Are My Hydrangea Leaves Turning Yellow?

When you see your hydrangea foliage starting to change color and turn yellow, which is a process called chlorosis, you might think that your plant is dying from some plant disease, pests, or being mistreated in some way, but in fact, the opposite is true. It’s common to see panicle hydrangea leaves, particularly the ones on the interior of the shrub, yellowing and dropping off, especially at the very beginning of the part of the season when the blooms are forming and this is actually a very clever survival/growth mechanism of this particular plant.

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What your hydrangea is doing when you see these types of yellow leaves is putting energy into the most important tasks, which we all know is creating those big, beautiful blooms. 🙂 So, if your hydrangea has yellow leaves, it’s basically just recognizing that it doesn’t have enough energy to both keep those leaves alive and create blooms, so it drops the less important leaves, in this case the ones in the centre of the plant that aren’t getting much sun anyway, and puts that energy into bloom-making instead. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

I should note as well, that although yellow leaves are a common issue for a lot of garden plants when they have received too much water, overwatering will most-likely not be an issue with your panicle hydrangeas as they’re quite tolerant of a lot rain and moisture, but miraculously, very drought-tolerant as well once they get established.

See also: What to do When You See Yellow Leaves on Roses

What to do About Yellow Leaves on Hydrangea Bushes

So, as I mentioned, the forming of yellow plant leaves in the centre of the plant that eventually drop off is a sign that your plant doesn’t have quite enough nutrient energy to sustain its growth, create beautiful blooms, and keep all its current leaves alive as it creates new stems and buds. That means that what you really need to do is feed it to prevent leaf fall-off. When you see those yellow leaves, it’s actually a little clue that now is the perfect time to feed your plant because blooms are forming and any energy you give it will go into bloom creation. I try to remember to feed all my hydrangeas every two weeks throughout the growing season, but I don’t always keep up with it and when I see the yellow leaves, I like to increase the frequency a little bit for a few weeks, feeding them maybe about every 10 days.

By the time I start to see a bit of fall color and my blooms show hints of deep pink, I can stop feeding for the rest of the autumn and winter.

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A little all-purpose plant food is really all you need here for fertilizer, given during watering according to package directions. If you really want to maximize blooms, a plant food with a higher amount of phosphorus (the middle number) will really help increase the number and size of your blooms.

Read next: How to Prune Hydrangeas for Maximum Growth

You should see the number of newly-yellowed leaves decrease pretty quickly as soon as you give your hydrangea the food it needs. The good news is that if you do absolutely nothing, the plant will still be fine, it will just have a few less leaves. The following year, new growth will be normal and you’ll have a chance to feed them again if you want to reduce the number of yellow, dropping leaves. 🙂

Have you ever encountered this issue with your panicle hydrangeas?

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