komachi balloon flowers, pink hydrangeas and black eyed susans
To "deadhead" plants means to remove their spent flowers. For many plants, deadheading promotes more flowering on the plants for that year than would occur without such plant care. For soft plants, you can deadhead by hand; other times, you'll need to deadhead with scissors or pruners.
I find that my favorite time in the garden is spent deadheading. Usually by hand as it's often a spur of the moment thing that happens as I'm walking up the stairs from my driveway and don't tend to have a pair of snippers holstered to my belt. In most cases I'm bent at the waist picking here and there as I walk the path of flowers. *my back is killing me by evening most of the time* The best is when I sit by one of my huge bouquets of tickweed and just pick off spent blooms the way a monkey picks fleas off a loved one....:) That imagery is exactly how it feels to me....I'm focused, sitting on my garden cart or directly on the flagstone path, separating each hairlike stem to find the hiding bit that needs to go.
Here's a picture of one of my tickweed plants...
During these times my thoughts wander to dreams, my kids, matters of the heart. I often will get buzzed by our little humming bird who seems to be happiest with company in the garden.
We have a new crop of little ones in our culdesac. When we moved here 8 years ago, both my girls were still in elementary school, now one starts college in a couple of weeks and the other is in her 2nd year of high school. Whenever the new littles see me planted on the ground like one of my flowers, they tend to migrate to me to tell me about their owwies, any big trauma or excitement they've had to deal with that day.
Without trying to sound predictable or cutsie....I feel that the past year has been filled with it's own form of deadheading...the pruning of bruised, dying and troubled parts of me/my life slowly and methodically being snipped away so that what's left of me is healthy and ready for new blooms and renewed growth. oxox
ps....here's an updated picture of my Vintage Wine Coneflowers pictured in the previous post.
