Hydrangea Tuff Stuff Ah-Ha® Mountain Hydrangea

A Proven Winners® ColorChoice® Flowering Shrubs variety, Tuff Stuff Ah-Ha®, a mountain hydrangea, is a small woody deciduous shrub offering year-round interest. With outstanding reblooming, it blooms continually on old wood from summer through fall. The massive dinner plate-size lacecap clusters of large waterlily-like doubled florets are held on long, slender stems. The color will be pink or blue depending on soil conditions. Although the sterile flowers make long-lasting cuts for fresh and dried arrangements, left in the garden, they're a valuable wildlife food source, attracting butterflies and beneficial insects in summer, and their seeds attracting songbirds in late fall.

After the first frost, the flower clusters turn tan to caramel, and along with the shredding and peeling papery brown bark on mature plants that reveals glimpses of the underlying cinnamon hue of stems and branches, they add a textural element to the winter garden, especially pleasing in a snowy landscape. The hollow stems also provide nesting habitats for bees.

This shrub is similar to bigleaf hydrangea but tends to be smaller and more compact. It has a refined, mounded habit and a medium growth rate. It's perfect for a container, but it is also a great specimen, bed, and border plant.

Cold hardy, easy to grow and maintain, Tuff Stuff Ah-Ha hydrangea prefers some morning sun and afternoon shade; rich, well-draining soil; and plenty of water. A shade-loving shrub, it can tolerate more sun if the soil is kept consistently moist. Tuff Stuff Ah-Ha hydrangea is heat and salt tolerant.

Hydrangea serrata change colors with the pH of the soil, turning pink in alkaline soil and blue in acid soils.