Deadheading Flowers In Your Commercial Landscape

"Deadhead" seems an oddly inappropriate word to use when talking about a landscape full of healthy living plants and flowers. However, deadheading keeps your display gardens neat and blooming. It’s a form of good plant housekeeping.

You can get by without it, but your landscape will give you extra ‘oh’s and ah’s’ if you prune, pinch and deadhead a bit. Plants - like all of us - need boundaries. Proper plant pinching gives our herbaceous buddies just that, while keeping our commercial landscape looking its best.

Basically, deadheading means the removal of flowers that have already put on their show. But should you cut back all perennial flowers? Are there some flowers that pop again nicely after a good shearing? Is there a reason not to remove a spent flower? Yes and maybe we can answer each of those questions.

Horticulturists say that 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, but 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’.

With some plants, like hardy geranium or coreopsis, it might seem a daunting task to remove all the small flowers. In that case, shearing the plants with a long bladed hedge shear works really well. With other plants, pruning is the way to go.

Have your staff choose places to cut when deadheading larger flowers. For perennials that have leaves on the flower stem, cut just above a leaf node. That way, the cut becomes hidden by the leaf, but for flowers with a leafless stem, like daylilies, cut them down to the base of the plant and remove the entire stem.

Many gardeners find the seed-head free look most attractive. But besides appearance and forcing re-bloom, there’s another reason to remove spent flowers. It’s actually the same reason some gardeners leave on seed heads. When some plants are allowed to set seed, you get baby plants.

There are perennials that are famously great self-seeders. Columbine, for one, loves to roam and spread its pretty seedlings to places garden far away from the parent plant. Globe Thistle is another one that likes big families.

Having baby plants about can help you fill in areas of your display plantings. If you want to encourage your plants to self-seed, you won’t be able to use any pre-emergent herbicides in the garden. They block germination of all seeds; both weed seeds and perennial flower seeds.

There are particularly attractive seed heads. Some plants have very decorative seed pods, Pasque Flower for instance, and plants like Liatris are great for attracting finches with their seeds.

If cutting your plants back and seed heads aren’t for you, there are plants that don’t need to be spruced up after blooming. Some perennials like Columbine and Baptisia are self cleaning. Another low maintenance way to go would be to plant fall bloomers - when they are done blooming just cut them to the ground and you've done your fall clean up.

Every garden is different and they should be. If you love birds perching on your Echinacea and snacking, leave on the seed heads. Neat can be over-rated.

Keep in mind that Greens Keeper Landscape Maintenance can Help!  Please contact us at; Sales: 623-848-8277 We serve businesses like yours throughout the entire Phoenix Metro Area.

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Greens Keeper Landscape Maintenance, LLC
623-848-8277
http://www.commerciallandscapecare.com
greenskeeperllc@cox.net