Visiting Boston this month, I knew the fancy wood sign outside the pale green building was karma: Garden Remedies.

“Finally some answers to my hydrangea bushes,” I thought, and vowed to return the next morning when they opened.

Unfortunately, not so helpful. Garden Remedies turned out to be a medical marijuana shop. Edibles, oils and patches, yes. Hydrangeas, not so much.

And so I was left to my own inadequate devices to unravel the maddening mystery: To prune or not to prune. And how much to prune. And when.

My mother, owner of the family green thumb, used to say that what kept her intrigued about gardening was the grand experiment of it all.

“You plant it here one year, and it’s not so good,” she would say. “So you move it to the other side of the house – to a different exposure. Or you play fertilizing less or more. Or watering less or more. And eventually, you figure it out.”, I remember her proclaiming in one particularly irrational moment that it would be boring if everything grew beautifully the first time.

With apologies to mom whose gardening apparently preceded the unpredictability of global warming, I’d take a little boring this year. With changing climes, gardening has started to complicate my life more than enrich it.

Here’s the thing. For the last few years, I had a reliable little stand of compact hydrangea bushes teeming with either pink or blue flowers. Blue if I went to the trouble of adding coffee grounds to them. Pink if I didn’t bother. And by the end of summer, they bloomed themselves out. Next spring, they were at it again. Life was simple.

Not so much since we’ve become a rain forest. Steamy days, it turns out, grow gigantic foliage and for months no sign of anything else. Now – in October – the giants have decided finally to flower. Delicate white cauliflower buds have not yet announced if they’ll be pink or blue but simply declared that they are here and what are you going to do about us?

I have no clue. If I do nothing, they will be “nipped in the bud,” so they say, by the first frost and who knows. Leaving the stem intact may drain the plant’s blossom-producing energy for next spring. If I cut back the whole enchilada, I may compromise some stem that houses a not-yet-appeared bud waiting to come out later. I rack my brain. Did I really whack it all back last year and if so, was that – and not the rain and heat – the real problem? This is all so complicated.

I throw the question to the Universe, i.e., Facebook, and am inundated with wisdom and more questions. I should definitely not prune until early spring. I should wait until after the first frost has passed. I should check with my “landscaping service” (he, I suppose, who mows the grass). I should find out what type of hydrangea I have. I Google images of hydrangea leaves, squinting to see if mine is actually a mophead or mountain hydrangea or perhaps a lacecap? They look strikingly similar.

I consider conducting an experiment, a la mom, pruning one at this time and another at that, and making some kind of record of what I did to whom and when.

I consider ripping them all out and replacing them all with mint, which will eagerly overtake the entire neighborhood without regard to weather, and ending this stress.

I consider returning to Garden Remedies.

Copyright 2018 Pat Snyder