Three years ago I gave my hydrangea a thorough rose type prune and it took
until the following year to flower. At the moment it is covered in the old
dead flower heads, should I just dead head the hydrangea as dead heading a
rose, or should I just let it be?

if you use the search engine on this site and type in hydrangea you'll see there are a number or previous posts on this topic which go into great detail.

but in short, yes just remove spent flowers, unless your still subject to frosts, then i'd wait a couple of weeks

On Thu, 6 Apr 2006 15:03:31 +0100, "MrBlueSkye"
wrote:

Three years ago I gave my hydrangea a thorough rose type prune and it took
until the following year to flower. At the moment it is covered in the old
dead flower heads, should I just dead head the hydrangea as dead heading a
rose, or should I just let it be?

This question is frequently asked here. Hydrangeas flower on old wood.
The usual recommendation is to cut between a third and a half of the
old stems right down to the lowest bud, but just take the tops off the
remainder. Do it every spring. This will leave you plenty of old wood
for flowering this year, but allow a steady supply of new wood growing
from the base and stop the plant getting woody and out of hand.


--
Chris

E-mail: christopher[dot]hogg[at]virgin[dot]net

Tiger303 wrote:
if you use the search engine on this site and type in hydrangea you'll
see there are a number or previous posts on this topic which go into
great detail.

At the risk of frightening you to death, there's only you 'on a site' with a
search box, the rest of posters here are in a newsgroup called
uk.rec.gardening - gardenbanter just steals our posts and gets paid for all
the advertisements.


HTH