Lots of our garden plants benefit from cutting back during the season, just before they start into growth, or in autumn when foliage and stems collapse into a messy, decaying heap.
Cutting back, deadheading is one of those tasks where the results are apparent almost immediately. And it is something that can be done even on damp days, as long as care is taken not to trample and compact the soil.
When and how to cut back can confuse some of us, and we can all too easily chose the wrong moment and lose precious flowers or new foliage.
In early winter the cut back begins with tidying hellebores.
Perfect Hellebores
Sometimes our plants simply don’t look as good as those in other people’s gardens, certainly not as good as in the glossies! The trick is a little essential maintenance, timed perfectly (or at least within the right season!), to enable a plant to look it’s best.
Hellebores really do repay attention in autumn or early winter before they begin to flower. That old, tatty, ragged foliage has done its job and needs to be removed.
Working carefully around the plant, establish whether the new season’s flower shoots have started to emerge. If not, then you can give the plant a quick haircut. If there are new flower stems showing, work carefully, removing only old, tired leaf stems.
Before you compost the leaves, chop them roughly. Otherwise their coarse texture will take longer to break down in the heap.
Add a little compost around the crown of the plant, not burying it, in cooler climates. In a week or so, that bald patch will be sporting newly emerging flowers, held clear above the soil for you to enjoy. Bliss, a perfect plant.
Prolonging the display
Deadheading. We are always being told to remove dead flower heads to prolong the flowering season. Why? Because the sole objective of our flowering plants is procreation; producing seed, making 'babies' to live on after them.
 Removing dead flower heads is key to prolonging flowering. All the plant's energy goes into producing a fine crop of seed, instead of a wonderful show of late summer flowers. Deadheading prevents seed production and the plants, intent on making 'babies', flower again.
Penstemons, lupins, delphiniums, phlox, roses, geums, hemerocallis, dianthus and many other favourites will simply flower again, or for longer, if we remove their dead flower-heads.
Mid-Season Cut Back
Some plants need to be shorn of their dead flowerheads and cut hard back mid-season, to almost ground level, to encourage a second flush of bloom.
Nepeta (catmint), Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle), shrubby Salvia supberba, delphiniums and geraniums are just a few of the summer flowering plants that resond to this treatment.
A relaxing Pursuit
Cutting back and deadheading are wonderful tasks with almost instant improvement. Secateurs in hand, compost bag at the ready, there's little to worry the gardener. In all, a relaxing pursuit.
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