Plant Preview


Welcome to Plant Preview, a blog dedicated to helping gardeners learn about gardening techniques and preview new plant cultivars. Read about new plants here first and hear how your "comrades in compost" are making use of new plant introductions in their gardens and landscapes. Blog author Geri Laufer is a life-long dirt gardener, degreed horticulturist, author and former County Extension Agent. Plant Preview is copyrighted by Geri Laufer.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

DYK? Dead-heading Shrubs Makes Them Rebloom!


by Geri Laufer

Basil flowers
Botany
The main “goal” of any plant is to flower, set seed in order to reproduce and then die. Dead-heading is the process of picking off dead flower heads so that the plant in question will keep blooming by developing more flower buds in its continued attempts to set seed.

Annuals and Horticultural Practice
Annual flowers go through this process in one year. In order to prevent the early demise of an annual color bed and keep plantings blooming at full strength throughout the season, gardeners and landscapers routinely dead-head the plantings. This causes the flowers to continue flowering  and the herbs producing more leaves for harvest. Bedded-out marigolds or pansies in a flower bed, or an herb bed planted with annual basil come to mind.

Perennials
Although perennials grow and increase in the garden for several years, they too can be profitably dead-headed. For example, purple coneflower and black-eyed Susans regularly bloom twice a season if the old flower heads are removed immediately after their first flowering.

Dead Headed Seed Pods
Woody Ornamental Shrubs
Typically, dead-heading is applied to herbaceous plants and not to woody ornamentals. In the case of woodies, most people never think of applying this horticultural practice to the flowering shrubs in their gardens or landscapes.

Seed Pods Blue Angel Althea
Blue Angel Althea
One reliable shrub that will continue to flower if the old seed capsules are removed is Blue Angel Althea from Garden Debut®. This shrub flowers prolifically in late summer through early fall, and is covered with blue trumpets. But if the seed capsules (that resemble tiny green acorn-squash) removed before they begin to ripen, Blue Angel will continue to flower much later than normal, adding its color and joy to the landscape.  

Enjoy the delightful color of Blue Angel Altheas twice as long by dead-heading old flowers and young seed pods.



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