Recently, The Gardener of Eden, has added other forms of gardening to his services. Amung these additional services, includes deadheading and pruning. Here are some tips and tricks when it comes to dead-heading in your own or is someone else's garden.
What is deadheading?
Deadheading keeps your garden neat. You might even call it, a form of good plant housekeeping.
Your garden can get by without it. However, with your occasional deadheading, prune, and pinching, comes more "oohs" and "ahhs". This, although may seem a little obsessive, adds beautiful touches to your garden.
Just like people, plants also need boundaries. As we all know plants have no thinking mind, like us humans have. Therefore, in order to keep our herbivore pals in line, we need to do their thinking for them and put them in their boundaries. This include cutting them back. Allowing them to grow stronger and more beautifully.
Simply put, "deadheading" is the removal process of flowers that have already, "put on their show". By removing only the flower (not the plant from its roots) your are allowing a new flower to grow in the old one's place. Not only are those flowers removed, but even expired flowers or wilted flowers can be plucked, to let a new fresh one grow in its place.
However, you should carefully choose exactly which places to cut on large flowers are appropriate to deadhead.
Horticulturalist Wendy Brister said plants respond to pruning to perpetuate
their species.
“With many plants you get re-bloom when you deadhead since,
basically, the goal of the plant is to grow, set seed and die,” said Brister,
“So if you take the spent flowers away and prevent it from setting seed, it will
set new flowers and keep trying to produce seed before it ‘dies’.”