A Proven Winners® ColorChoice® Flowering Shrubs variety, Tuff Stuff Top Fun™, a lacecap mountain hydrangea, is a woody deciduous shrub offering year-round interest. Heavy blooming, it blooms and reblooms continually on old wood from summer through fall. Highly colorful, the lacecap clusters of hot pink or vibrant purple florets "pop" against flushes of dark blue-green foliage, which takes on shades of burgundy in late summer. Although the vibrant flowers make long-lasting cuts for fresh and dried arrangements, left in the garden, they're a valuable wildlife food source, attracting bees, 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. Tuff Stuff Top Fun has a refined, compact habit that's perfect for a container, but the small shrub is also a great specimen, bed, and border plant, especially nice massed or grouped. Cold hardy to Zone 4, easy to grow and maintain, Tuff Stuff Top Fun hydrangea prefers full to part sun; rich, well-draining soil; and plenty of water. The shrub can tolerate more sun if the soil is kept consistently moist, but Tuff Stuff Top Fun hydrangea is bred to be especially heat tolerant as well as salt tolerant. Hydrangea serrata change colors with the pH of the soil, turning pink in alkaline soil and blue in acid soils.
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