Regular deadheading will be easier if you’ve the time to ‘keep everything in order’ and the garden’s not too big. The larger it is, you’ll find like me, that there’s never enough time to get round everything.
And that could be a good thing as there are good reasons for not deadheading some flowers. For example, rambling and species roses can produce beautiful hips and many seed heads brighten up an autumn garden. Herbaceous plants like aquilegias, and herbs such as borage and dill self seed as well as feeding some birds.
On the other hand, some plants do need regular, if not frequent, deadheading, either because the process gives you more blooms or the spent flower can damage neighbouring buds.
But it’s worth emphasising that deadheading promotes extra flowers in a very small number of plants. The introductory paragraph in the RHS advice on deadheading states: “It [deadheading] is done to keep plants looking attractive and encourage more blooms, whether in beds or borders, containers or hanging baskets.”
Annual bedding and container plants produce a succession of blooms and often ‘self clean’ – provide a fine flush over a long period, with spent blooms discretely shrivelling and being replaced.
But deadheading does work with sweet peas, as it triggers the plant to produce new blooms. The process is caused by interaction between hormones auxin and cytokin. Auxins stimulate the growth of a plant’s roots and stems. The auxins at the tip of a stem prevent buds below the top one from developing, but when the tip is removed, other buds emerge, thanks to the hormone cytokin and a flower, or possibly just leaves emerge to replace the one you’d removed. [You’ll see this at work when you prune an apple stem and the leading bud is replaced by a flush of spindly little stems.]
So with sweet peas, cut the whole flower stem back to the join with the main stem and this prevents seed from developing and forces the plant to produce more flowers. These subsequent shoots will be shorter, and flowers will go over more quickly, so as the season develops, you’ll have a relentless battle on your hands as the plant frantically attempts to produce seed! A similar process occurs with hybrid tea roses. So remove a spent bloom, cutting the stem back to just above a leaf.
And keep an eye on any large doubles and gorgeously blowsy blooms on the likes of peonies. As they go over, they form a soggy mess of petals, called balling, and this will rot any nearby buds.
Apart from essential deadheading, I for one prefer to leave a lot of seed heads for self seeding and feeding birds.
Plant of the week
Blueberry ‘Rubel’ has small but intensely flavoured berries that are said to be particularly high in anti-oxidants as it is closely related to the wild species that grows in the woods of New Jersey.
Blueberry ‘Rubel’ (Image: unknown)
With pretty bell shaped flowers in spring and brilliant crimson autumn foliage this variety is as ornamental as it is delicious.
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