Off with their heads

Saturday 4 August 2012

This summer's wind and rain may have taken their toll on shrubs and flowers, but you can refresh the border and renew some of its colour with a spot of deadheading, removing faded blooms from flowering plants.

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Dave Allan

While many modern cultivars don't produce viable seed, others provide attractive hips and seed cases to bring colour to the border into winter. They are also a vital food source for many garden birds, so wield the secateurs with care.

Besides tidying up borders, containers or hanging baskets, deadheading may encourage more flowering. Once flowers have been pollinated, a plant puts its energy into seed production, so it won't continue flowering. If the flowers are removed early enough, a nifty nip compels the plant to produce more blooms.This steady succession of flowers is especially true for sweet peas. It's time-consuming, but you do need to visit the sweet pea stand every day or two to pick off fading flowers; once the seed pod has formed you're too late. During a normal summer, I combine the job with watering pots – a task that's rarely been necessary this year.Repeat-flowering roses are treated like sweet peas. Without deadheading, they will keep on flowering, but you'll get a larger and more attractive display if you pinch out the spent flower heads. I collect the faded blooms in a bucket so I can tip them straight into the compost bin, rather than letting the petals spread all over the bed and nearby path.There has been a debate about how much of the rose's flower stem you should remove. The diameter of the stem narrows as it nears the flower. Any new flowering stem growing from a node close to the old flower will have a smaller diameter than the parent stem, but it will grow quickly. This means that new, but smaller flowers will also appear more speedily. The further down the original flowering stem you cut, the thicker its diameter will be. So, any new stems that sprout here will be longer and thicker, but slower to produce blooms.This year, it's more important than ever to clear away any browning petals. Everything in the garden is sodden. As the petals fall, they invariably stick to the wet flowers, leaves and buds nearby, causing a mess and encouraging rot on neighbouring flowers and forming buds. Wonderfully full herbaceous peony flowers are especially vulnerable. True, they haven't scattered everywhere as they would in a dry summer, but decay and wet has transformed the blooms into ghastly brown lumps.In a sunny, dry summer, you get a second flush of lupins and delphiniums if the flowering stalks are cut back immediately after flowering. Unfortunately, a second flush of small flowers is unlikely this year.Use sharp secateurs for deadheading the large flowering stems of lupins and delphiniums. If you want dahlias to keep flowering, you'll also need secateurs to deal with their tough stems. When cutting a faded flower and its stalk, be sure to distinguish between fresh buds and spent flowers. The buds have flattened ends, while spent flowers have pointed ends. My thumbnail is sufficiently strong and sharp that it makes the perfect cutting tool for the stalks of faded pelargonium blooms.Luckily for less assiduous gardeners like myself, not everything needs to be deadheaded. It's unnecessary to remove the dead flowers of single-flowering roses – many of the traditional old climbers and ramblers and the Scots spinosissima. Enjoy the hips and even use them to make wine.Many other flowers that only flower once can be left to develop their attractive seed cases. Enjoy the pepperpot seed heads of poppies, the ridged seed cases of some lilies, or the large, flat seed heads of angelicas and fennels. The branching flower stems of sempervivums fade to resemble little palm trees. So, if you're growing a plant for the first time, try leaving it to discover whether its fruiting parts are as attractive as its flowers.While the autumn display of seeds and berries is easy on the eye, they are a valuable source of food for garden birds. After the pretty lemon flowers of the statuesque giant scabious (Cephalaria gigantea) turn to seed, the birds move in. Goldfinches, greenfinches and dunnocks are particularly attracted to the small seeds and to those of solidago, Michaelmas daisies and Verbena bonariensis. So holster your secateurs and enjoy the show.On a smaller scale, rudbeckias have a dual role. Their yellow, auburn and tawny flowers provide an early autumn splash of colour when grouped together in blocks. Once the flowers have faded, the central black cones contain a good supply of seeds for smaller garden residents. Three species of rudbeckia have been specially developed for gardeners. Rudbeckia fulgida and R Laciniata are perennials and only need cutting back in February, while R Hirta is biennial but needs to be treated as an annual. n

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Off with their heads

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