Why Are My White Hydrangea Blooms Turning brown?

It was time for Plantman to play Sherlock Holmes.

I had planted the Phantom hydrangeas for a client a couple of years ago and this year they were showing off like nobody’s business. Two weeks ago I visited the site on other business and I was amazed at how good the Phantoms looked

So, I was amazed when Randy called me Monday morning and said, “You need to come trim these hydrangea blooms. I think they have a disease.” I visited the site again on Tuesday and was saddened by the appearance of the flowers by the pool. I looked at them and shook my head.

—What could it be? I looked again for fungus but this malady was different. “Ahhh,” I told myself, “They must have pressure-washed the deck and gotten chemicals on the flowers.”

So I asked Randy to come out and look at the plants with me.

I asked, “Did you have your deck pressure-washed? This looks like some kind of chemical damage.”

He replied, “No, we haven’t done anything like that.”

He stopped and thought…”We haven’t even been out there much because the mosquitoes were so bad. I called the exterminator last week and had the whole area fogged…”

We looked at each other and nodded. That was the answer.

The lesson we learned was, if you have your garden fogged for mosquitoes, ask the applicator to fog under the flowering plants and not from the top.

I think there are a lot of exterminators that don’t know such as that.

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