Pruning perennial and annual flowers

Why cut back flowers?

It’s not just trees and shrubs that need pruning. Flowering perennials, annuals and bedding plants will make more flowers, better quality blooms or bushier plants with the odd nip and tuck. There are several easy, undemanding techniques that can be carried out while you are pottering around the garden.

Promote flowering

• The majority of flowers bloom and set seed, a natural climax to the growth cycle. Deadheading flowers as they fade not only tidies up the plant, but it interrupts this sequence and stimulates new flowers to appear.
• Deadhead fading flowers of bedding plants, annuals and herbaceous perennials regularly to stimulate new blooms and prevent plants from self-seeding.
• With lupins, foxgloves, delphiniums and verbascum as soon as the flowers begin to fade, completely remove spent spikes to their base or nearest bud.
• This technique also prevents unwanted self-seeding of many perennials. Simply snap off the dead flower with your thumb and forefinger.
• Try it on summer bedding plants and annual and biennial flowers, such as calendula, godetia and pansies.

Improve shape and form

Make bushier plants

• Many plants concentrate their energy in a single tip bud, while other buds along the stem remain dormant.
• If this tip bud is removed then buds lower down will produce side shoots. This is called stopping, pinching or tip pruning and is used to make bushier growth.
• Some plants will only need pinching once, such as bedding plants and sweet peas. Several perennials may need pinching a few times – take out the initial bud of a dahlia and then pinch out the resulting side growth.

Keep perennials compact

• Chopping back perennials in late-spring will make bushier plants that flower later on in the season and often flower more prolifically. Known as the Chelsea chop, it is carried out in late May, soon after the famous flower show has finished.
• To do this, cut or pinch back plants by half. Sedum, rudbeckia, echinacea, helenium and golden rod will all respond well to this technique.

Prevent plants from becoming leggy

• Lightly shearing over aubrieta, lavender and alyssum after flowering combines deadheading with light pruning. It will prevent leggy growth, keep plants compact and produce an abundance of flowers the following year.

Prevent pests

• Cut back yellowing foliage on hardy perennials such as daylilies, crocosmia and asters. It will make the garden look tidier and stop pests from using the leaves as shelter over winter.

Watch video

In this video Toby Buckland demonstrates cutting back flowers and deadheading.