Time to Pick Which Flowers to Avoid Next Year

If the dog days of summer are causing more flower maintenance than you’d like, make up a list of flowers to avoid next year.

Start with those that require dead-heading, the regular removal of fading blooms to stimulate new flowers.

Such removal is required for the best floral displays from many annuals, including marigolds, zinnias, cosmos, dahlias, geraniums, petunias and verbenas. They will bloom much less if ripening seeds.

(With large flowers such as zinnias, just pinch or cut to the next branch. With others, such as verbena, shearing works best. Never remove more than a third or so.)

Yet while it keeps the garden loking neat and more flowers coming, dead-heading can become quite tiresome, particularly when temperatures are in the 100s.

Some flowers--such as grandiflora petunias, snapdragons and zinnias--will also require pruning or pinching to keep them from becoming spindly or leggy.

But other attractive flowers--among them ageratum, sweet alyssum, begonia, portulaca and catharanthus (vinca)--do not require such treatment.

So it’s often just as simple to select from a lower-maintenance, easier-to-grow group. (Make the choice before planting seeds or setting out transplants, of course.)

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Chrysanthemums and asters need a lot of pinching to promote bushiness. Sometimes the taller ones need staking too.

The lower-maintenance group will also include African daisy, celosia, cleome, coleus, dusty miller, flowering kale, lobelia, nicotiana, phlox and salvia. They won’t appeal to everyone, or do well in every climate, so check locally if you are not sure.

Be sure that you are not trying to grow a warm-season flower in a cool-season environment or vice versa. With hot weather, cool-season flowers will set seed quickly and deteriorate, for example.

Don’t plan to grow shade-lovers in sun or sun-lovers in shade. Group them by cultural needs. Do they like moist soil or dry conditions? Do they prefer regular fertilization or refuse to bloom where soil is too rich in nitrogen? Check the possibility of using slow-release fertilizers to cut application time.

Many flowers are low water users. Where possible, it makes sense to opt for those that don’t require regular watering to look good. Such a list includes longtime favorites, such as achillea, centaurea, coreopsis, gaillardia, gazania, oenothera, rudbeckia, salvia and statice.

Regardless of selection, flowers will need more frequent watering when younger without fully developed root systems. Always apply sufficient water to wet the root zone thoroughly. Such deep watering develops a deep root system. Shallow root systems are vulnerable to drying out. An easy test: insert a long screwdriver. It’s hard to push through dry soil.

Be a good observer.

Some flower seed is produced through open pollination. If you planted hybrids, which usually carry designations such as F-1 or F-2, the resulting plants seldom match the original and will not be worth saving, even if they germinate again.

Portulaca (moss rose) is a notable exception. It comes true to type most of the time. So observation from one season to the next is the only sure way to tell about self-sown seeds.

Annual coreopsis (calliopsis) is another that self-sows easily and looks great. But it requires dead-heading.