How to Deadhead Roses

Deadheading your roses is the removal of the withered, or otherwise finished blooms of a plant, in order to encourage fresh blooms and new growth, keeping the plant looking fresh. 

When it comes to Roses, perhaps the most iconic flower and one of the very loveliest of garden plants, regular deadheading is important to keep the sumptuous blooms looking fresh and attractive, all through the flowering season. One of the reasons you buy a rose for your garden is to see it bloom with flowers and not look at dead heads, so deadheading is the way forward to keep the blooms coming along.

Besides the obvious, as in making your roses look better, deadheading offers numerous benefits for the gardener. Primarily, deadheading is all about keeping the show going: as blooms begin to fade, a plant’s energy becomes devoted to producing seed instead. In the case of roses, a rosehip. This is a process which the gardener can craftily thwart for a time, by deadheading little and often, allowing for an elongated blooming period to the rose. Deadheading can also prevent rotting, disease and pests.

There is no great array of high-tech equipment that you can acquire for deadheading; but in general, all you need is a good pair of secateurs, or snips to some people. Gardening gloves are handy too as those thorns can be lethal on the hands and arms of the fellow gardener.

In the world of rose pruning, there are two methods for deadheading to choose from, depending on what you’re planning to remove. The likelihood is that in the course of a single flowering season you will find yourself employing both methods at different times and possibly both at once. It all depends upon whether you are removing a single, or several finished blooms from a flowering head, or where you are removing the whole flowering head itself.

Very often, when tending your roses, you will notice that individual blooms may begin to fade, or wilt, even though they are surrounded by healthy buds, or blooms. Generally, it is a good idea to deadhead as soon as the petals begin to fall. Of course, there is no need to remove the whole flowering head! To remove each individual bloom, make sure your skin is well protected by gloves and move in to snip just where the flower joins the stem. Try to catch the falling flower and deposit it in your bucket and leave the remaining buds and blooms to flower. This is a method beat applied as and when needed, so simply keep an eye out for wilting flowers and deadhead as needed!

Throughout the blooming season and very often after each significant flush of flowers, you will find that often whole clusters will show signs of wilting, or fading – it is time to remove the lot. To do this, again, make sure you are well protected and follow the stem of the faded flowering head to just where it makes a junction with the first leaf which has five leaflets – this is where to snip. Again, deposit in your bucket (a larger bucket will definitely come in handy here). After this has been done, it is a great idea to cut back any disproportionately large stems to the average height of the plant, in order to create a neat, rounded shape to your rose bush.

Remember: Not all roses were created equal and there are some slightly different tactics to approaching certain kinds. Rambling roses, for example, will proliferate in long tendril like growths, which will need to be cut back. They also only flower once, so it is important that as soon as the petals are falling it is time to prune. Roses can also be divided into single-flower and multi-flowered types, naturally, your pattern of deadheading will be affected by what types populate your garden.

Thankfully, however, the golden rule of simply checking for petal dropping, fading, or wilting, will hold good in all cases and you will be able to get a pretty good idea of the work ahead pretty quickly.

Deadheading is not a difficult garden task and can very effectively be done just a little at a time. Do it little and often and you can be sure of strong blooms and a fresh appearance for many flowering seasons to come.