The sunny perennial beds are gorgeous, the gardener is busy. It's peak bloom and fading day by day. For all of those flowers, we pay the price, it's called deadheading. We tiptoe, bend, pivot and stretch to remove those flowers that are making a mess of things. The peonies drop their petals in a heap on the ground. The bearded iris finish in a twist of mush, refusing to drop, instead hanging on and making new flowers look bad. The roses drop petals that turn brown, seemingly overnight.
We drag around wheelbarrow, tarp or other vessel to gather up the finishing pieces. The price we pay for all of that beauty. It often begins with helleborus, spent flowers quickly become large seed heads. The art of deadheading helleborus is best done sitting down, each flowering stem should be removed right down to the ground. The peonies are cut at a leaf juncture, preferably just under other leaves so the cut doesn't show. With iris you have to be careful, the finished flowering stalk is cut, as close to the ground as you can. Bending around in the iris can be tricky, one wrong move and you hear the snap of a bud or open flower that you just detached. I hate that!
With the biennials or short lived perennials, I am ruthless. Case in point is aquilegia or columbine, I not only remove the seed heads, but also the current leaves (they grow back quickly). Especially this year when columbine is marred by leaf miner. A few seed heads are left to ripen, you must keep track of which colors were best to let them go to seed.
Dianthus is best done with scissors, even hedge trimmers will work. Just a quick snip of flowering stems as they sit above the foliage. Some perennials go without deadheading, examples include, brunnera, Dicentra spectabilis or bleeding heart, corydalis and polygonatum. Even more reason to plant them.
This is the 3rd year for some bearded iris I bought from Winterberry Gardens in Cross Junction, Virginia. I don't know if the iris were better than usual, but it certainly seemed so. I am ready to dig another bed and order more. Here are photographs of some of the beauties:
Iris 'County Cork'
Iris 'Once On a Lullaby'
Iris 'Devil's Own'
Iris 'Little John'
The latter is a gorgeous garnet-purple, my personal favorite, well... like I could pick a favorite. Iris 'Devil's Own' is a green/yellow with many flowers per stalk. Iris 'Once Upon a Lullaby' was the first to flower and will probably be the last one open, a Don Spoon hybrid from 2011. Iris 'County Cork' has that impressive blue beard, it is a beauty!
Here is the link to Winterberry Gardens:
They're close enough to visit, God help you if you do.
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