Note 12: Off with its head - the art of deadheading
It seems everyone’s roses have been performing really well this year, though with the current hot weather, flowers have been going over rather more quickly than any of us would like. Enter the proactive gardener wielding secateurs to remove those unsightly brown and shrivelled flowers. Nothing wrong with that of course, and a 10 minute session of deadheading can totally transform a tired looking border. It’s the method of execution that can sometimes leave a lot to be desired.
Let’s not forget that deadheading is carried out purely for aesthetic reasons. Plants survive quite happily without human intervention. They've been doing it for millennia. Forget the old myth that deadheading will encourage your plants to send out more and more flowers, the explanation being that “the plant will be tricked into thinking it must keep trying to produce progeny in the form of seeds”.
The truth is that plants are either genetically predisposed to re-bloom or they are not. The extent to which they re-bloom is also determined in the same way. Indeed, it’s this trait of repeat flowering that growers intentionally select during a plant breeding programme.
Back to aesthetics. There’s a good and a bad way to deadhead. Once the flowers have gone over, not just the flower but the whole attached stem should be cut just above the junction/axil with a leaf. You can cut back to a very low axil if you want to keep the plant compact, or a high one if the plant is still filling space for you. Don’t just snip the flowers off leaving a mass of stems resembling Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen. No good will come of it - the stems will die back and go brown and no new growth will emanate from the ‘antlers’. You’ll just end up revisiting the plant a month later to rectify your mistake. See the attached photograph. Upper example good. Lower example bad.
The same goes for border plants like dahlias, Cosmos, or Lychnis coronaria (now Silene coronaria). Don’t simply nip the flower heads off. Follow the stem from the flower down to where it joins other stems. As with roses this will prevent the unsightly mass of stems that inevitably die back.
Sometimes a slight adjustment to your techniques can make all the difference.
