'Deadheading' flowers helps prolong color in the flower garden!

written by Deborah Benge Frost

There's nothing as pleasing and cheering as landscape color. It's important to us and garden visitors so you'll want to keep it going as much of the year as you can.

Here are a few pointers for promoting and prolonging summer color.

Flowering annuals, perennials and roses that have been bursting with color sometimes hit a lull in the bloom count category.

After a plant flowers it produces seed if the flower is pollinated. Once the flower is pollinated, seed will begin to develop. This seed-making process requires lots of energy and it can cause plants to stop flowering. Seed development requires so much energy that it will even pull nitrogen from the lowest leaves to move it to where it is needed the most. So, unless you want seed you need to short circuit this process by deadheading, the removal of the fading flower.

Some plant, such as roses, can be deadheaded by removing individual flowers. To deadhead fading roses or clusters of roses, make the cut just above a five-leaflet leaf attachment. This will initiate new growth from the bud between the stem and leaf attachment. Yarrow, butterfly bush, and gaillardia are good examples of plants to be deadheaded this way. Cut the stem just above a good healthy leaf instead of leaving flowerless stalks standing.

Many other flowers send up flowers on tall, slender stems. But they bloom in such mass quantities that deadheading individual stems is a time-consuming job. Instead, trim all the stalks after most flowers have faded. In a couple of weeks the plants will be back in full bloom. This works well on coreopsis, plains black foot daisy, Dalhberg daisy, four nerve daisy and pin cushion flower.

Some plants bloom heavily and have many short flower stalks with several flowers on each stalk that bloom starting at the bottom and finish at the extending tip. Because there are so many these could be sheared when there are just a few flowers at the tips. This may take a few leaves off too, but it should promote branching and more flowering. Autumn sage or Salvia greggii, May night and blue hill salvia fit into this type of deadheading. End of part one!