Deadheading, or removing spent flower heads from your plants, is a standard practice in the traditional garden, but how does it translate to native plant gardening where most gardeners are trying to maximize their ecological benefit?
To answer this question, let’s start by running through the “traditional” reasons for deadheading flowers in a garden.
What Are the Benefits of Deadheading Plants?
- Deadheading faded flowers will encourage more blooms, and in some cases the plants will undergo a whole second blooming period
- Deadheading cleans up floppy and unkempt looking spent flowers to promote a tidy garden look
- Deadheading prevents flowers from going to seed, which helps contain more aggressive plants and also prevents randomness from affecting a formally designed garden arrangement
- According to some gardeners, deadheading also cleans out dead plant material that may harbor pests and diseases.
Now, how do these reasons translate to the native plant environment?
Considerations for Deadheading in a Native Garden
First, if you’re a native plant gardener, you most likely do want to allow your plants to self-seed and spread. This helps suppress weeds, especially invasives, that you are likely battling in your yard and especially if you are working with a larger property. And allowing your plants to seed also results in free plants for you! Free plants that you can either leave in place, transplant to another part of your property, or even put in a pot and offer to your neighbors or other gardeners in your area.
To give an example, I planted a single eastern red columbine / aquilegia canadensis, and just a year and a half later I had so many volunteers that I was able to transplant and use as the backbone for three other new gardens in other parts of my yard.
The other seed-related argument against deadheading is that birds love to eat the seeds, and deadheading will take away a crucial food source for them, especially entering the colder winter months when they have fewer other options. Additionally, leaving more of the plant intact also creates habitat for a variety of wildlife including bees and other insects and even birds that also like to perch on spent stalks.
The “tidy garden” point is a more interesting one when we approach it from a native plant gardening standpoint. For native plant gardeners, our sense of what’s considered “beautiful” often shifts. A completely cleaned-up winter garden where the only thing on the ground is mulch may be pleasing to many gardeners, but the standing stalks, seedheads, and berries of the winter garden have their own beauty which we can come to appreciate. That beauty of contrast and elevation is enhanced by the many birds that come to visit those winter stalks for seeds.
But on the other hand, if you are in an urban or smaller suburban lot and your garden is highly visible, it’s likely you are hoping to promote native plants and showing your neighbors that they are just as garden-worthy as exotic ornamentals. So with this philosophy, deadheading (and/or spent stalk pruning) some of your plants in the most prominent parts of your garden can be a good tool in showing that your native garden can adhere to “traditional” garden norms and may help in your efforts to convert more people in your community to give native plants a try.
The “harboring pests and diseases” argument is less persuasive. Unless your plants had a significant infestation by an invasive pest, or a condition like coneflower rosette mites, you should cut and remove the affected flowers and also the stalks to prevent them from returning the following year. But you should not proactively do this just out of a general fear that they could be harboring pests. On the contrary, you most likely do want to allow butterfly and moth species to overwinter, and keeping plant material makes this possible. Deliberately cutting down flowers and leaving stalks of different lengths to encourage bees to hibernate inside, on the other hand, is a different consideration and can be a great idea.
The effects of deadheading on your plants is another issue that is hotly debated and there are arguments that support multiple positions. The basic idea is that you are preventing the plant’s energy from producing seed to producing more growth, including flowers, so those can eventually go to seed. Some sources say that deadheading leads to healthier plants: “When dead blooms are left clinging to flowering plants, they sap the nutrition and strength from the core of the plants and rob them of the energy to produce new and colorful blooms. The deadheading process redirects plants energy from seed production to root and vegetative growth.” But others counter that this vegetative growth comes at the expense of root growth. Either way, deadheading is probably not a good idea for younger native perennials.
It is true that deadheading will promote more flowers which in turn benefit pollinators. Coreopsis is an example of a genus that often has a whole second bloom if deadheaded, so this could be a point in favor of doing so. One article suggested a list of native plants that do well with deadheading, which includes: Beebalm (Monarda didyma), Perennial Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia fulgida), Coreopsis (C. lanceolata & C. grandiflora), Garden Phlox (Phlox paniculata) and Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa)
Our Final Verdict
Our ultimate advice on deadheading native plants is to usually avoid doing so, but in certain situations finding a middle ground or compromise.
You almost always want to avoid deadheading if you’re planting a more naturalized garden. But many gardeners who have smaller properties, HOAs to contend with, or want to promote natives by making their gardens look more tidy and “traditional,” may want to do some deadheading for aesthetic reasons.
And in these situations, you can go halfway: deadhead some blooms to gain a bit of extra blooming time and do some cleaning up in visible areas like a front yard native garden, but leave some for the birds too.
Another compromise if you deadhead is to scatter seeds on the ground (or save them for planting later). And a small pile of stems will still provide habitat, which you can put in a less front-facing garden spot.
Chelsea Chop vs. Deadheading
A final wrinkle to the discussion is that there’s another gardening practice you can do that is sometimes described similarly to deadheading, the chelsea chop. The major difference, however, is that this means cutting plants back earlier in the season which can serve to eventually produce more blooms. The chelsea chop is most often associated with later summer and fall flowering plants like asters and goldenrods.
By cutting those perennials back by about half in June to early July, they will typically produce more flowers later in the season, and they also tend to lead to a smaller and more compact plant that will conform to a more “traditional” garden look with specimen plants for those gardeners for whom that is a consideration. Outside of being an unnatural practice, the chelsea chop doesn’t have nearly as many potential downsides as deadheading. (And you could even argue that plants being browsed by rabbits and other small mammals would result in a similar effect.)
Leave a Reply