Usually, last year's growth loses its leaves, turns brown and goes dormant for the winter, then new buds pop up on those vertical stems and grow new leaves/flowers the following spring and summer.

But this winter was colder, with many days/weeks of snow covered ground and generally bad weather. This caused damage to many shrubs like hydrangeas and euonymous bushes. So when spring came around, and I looked closely at last year's hydrangea stems, it was obvious they were not coming back this year, and the buds were dried out and dead.

At first I thought it may be a detriment to the plants, but at the same time I realized that new growth would most likely come up in spring. I even had a client make the mistake of heavily pruning the limbs on her euonymous shrubs that had browned leaves(which fell off). That was a mistake, because I witnessed euonymous that werent pruned grow new leaves all over their branches, and in fact all the new leaves seemed to make the plants look fresh and new.

But the hydrangeas were different in that their branches obviously were not going to leaf out again, with a few exceptions. So I had to prune the old limbs off of the plants. Then I start seeing new growth popping up at the base of the plants, but I was thinking that maybe not many new branched would come up and the plants would look thin. But thats not what happened. In fact, LOTS of new branches came up and the hydrangeas filled out completely so that you'd never know there was winter damage! Because of all the new growth, I think they actually look better than they otherwise would look, because everything is new, as opposed to old limbs with new leaves.

So the harsh winter didnt cause irreparable damage, it actually helped the plants look healthier than they would have otherwise. That may not be true with every plant, but it was here.....