How to deadhead flowering plants

As the skies clear and the days are warming up, our gardens are alive with growth. And with growth, come wonderful flowers! 🌺

While your garden begins to thrive, flower buds open all around, the biggest question we get asked at The Pavilion is how to prolong the flowering period of flowers in our gardens - the simple answer is deadheading ✂️

Nature is truly magnificent. Nature ensures that a plant does not develop all its flowers at the one time. Shrubs and plants come into flower bit by bit. Each individual flower can remain looking at its best for up to 6 weeks, depending on favourable weather conditions. When individual flowers are beginning to fade, the plant is already producing new flowers, thereby extending the flowering period for the longest possible time. As a result, you will find that some flowers on your plants and shrubs are looking fabulous with the older flowers looking tired and fading. To ensure your plants look their best throughout the flowering season, you need to do this - deadhead your flowers and we are here to show you how! 

In the video below, Peter Dowdall, demonstrates how to deadhead summer bedding plants and garden shrubs. There is a difference in how you deadhead both; with annual plants you can just cut off the fading flowers. For example with Marigolds, you will follow the stem back to where it meets the plant and snip the stem from there. Removing these fading flowers will encourage more flowers to grow thereby extending the flowering season. 

With a shrub or perennial, you will ideally use a garden tool called a secateurs. You don't just want to pinch off the flower as you could leave some dead wood behind. You will want to snip off the stem holding the flower to a node. The node is simply where the leaf meets the stem. 

Some plants such as Geum for example, can go quite scraggy with growth, so when you are deadheading you use it as an opportunity to tidy up the plant by removing any excess unwanted growth but just make sure you cut the stem at the point of a node. 

To have glorious looking containers and flower beds, get into the habit of deadheading regularly, its so easy, just a couple of minutes every day will make such a wonderful difference to your outdoor space!

For all your gardening questions, we are here to help; call to our garden centre in Cork or call us on 021 4888134, we are open 7 days!