Gadenin日本語Get the appThe plant is not dying, it is finishing
Flowering stops, the leaves go from green to pale to yellow over two or three weeks, and the whole plant flattens and dries to nothing. Every year some gardeners water harder at this point, or feed, or dig the plants up assuming they are dead. All three make things worse. This is the normal end of an anemone's year, timed by rising temperature, and the plant is deliberately shutting down and shipping everything it has back into the corm underground.
Those few weeks of yellowing foliage are doing real work. The corm that goes into dormancy fat is the corm that flowers well next season; the corm whose leaves were cut off green will be small and will flower thinly. So leave the foliage alone until it has gone properly yellow and pulls away easily, however untidy it looks. Stop watering, stop feeding, and let it go.
Lift or leave: it depends on your summer
A dormant anemone corm sitting in warm wet soil rots. That single fact decides the question. Where summers are dry, or where the bed is sharply drained and sunny and gets no irrigation, corms can stay in the ground and come back the following season, often as a slowly thickening clump. Where summers are wet and warm, or where the bed will be watered for the sake of whatever is planted after them, leave them in and a good proportion will not return.
Winter cold matters at the other end. In areas where the ground freezes hard, autumn-planted corms left in place can be killed outright by cold rather than wet, and lifting is again the safer course. If you are unsure about your own conditions, lift half the block and leave half, label both, and let next season settle the argument for your garden.
| Your summer and winter | Leave in the ground? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dry summer, mild winter | Yes | Corms bake dry naturally and clumps thicken |
| Wet summer, mild winter | No, lift and dry | Warm wet soil rots dormant corms |
| Dry summer, hard freezing winter | Only under a deep dry mulch | Cold, not wet, is the risk |
| Wet summer, hard freezing winter | No, lift and store | Both risks apply |
| Grown in pots | Yes, if the pot is kept dry | Move the pot under cover and stop watering |
Lifting and drying, step by step
Do this once the foliage has yellowed but before it has vanished entirely, because the dead leaves are your only marker for where the corms are. Choose a dry day and work when the soil is dry enough to crumble rather than smear.
- Fork them out wide Push a fork in six inches (15 cm) outside the block and lever the whole section up rather than digging into it. Corms multiply and drift sideways during the season, so they are rarely exactly where you planted them.
- Break the clumps apart by hand Each original corm will have made a knobbly cluster. Pull it apart with your fingers along the natural lines. Do not cut, and do not force pieces that do not want to separate.
- Brush off soil dry, do not wash Let the soil dry on the corms for an hour and then rub it off. Washing puts water into tissue that you are trying to dry down and is the commonest cause of losses in storage.
- Dry in a single layer for two to three weeks Spread them on a tray or newspaper in a shaded, airy, frost-free place around 60-70F (16-21C). They will shrivel back to the hard dark lumps you originally bought. That is the correct end point.
- Sort and discard Throw out anything soft, moldy, or with a bruised patch. One rotting corm in a bag will take several of its neighbors with it over a few months of storage.
- Store dry, dark and airy Paper bags, cardboard boxes or open trays with a little dry sand or vermiculite, somewhere cool, dark and dry around 50-60F (10-16C). Never sealed plastic, which traps moisture and rots the lot.
Corms lifted after their first season are usually bigger than the ones you bought and will give more flowers next year. Keeping the large ones separate from the small ones at storage time lets you plant them in separate blocks and get an even display rather than a patchy one.
Pots and beds through the dormant months
A potful is the easiest case. When the leaves yellow, move the pot somewhere sheltered from rain, stop watering, and leave it. The corms sit dry in their own dry compost until you either tip them out to sort in late summer or simply start watering again in autumn. A pot left out in summer rain, on the other hand, will be empty next year.
In the open ground, mark the block clearly before the foliage disappears if you are leaving corms in place, and resist planting something thirsty on top of them. Bedding annuals watered all summer above dormant anemone corms is a reliable way to lose them without ever knowing why.
What to record before you forget
Write down the date you lifted, how many corms you got back compared with how many you planted, and how they were stored. A block that goes in at fifty corms and comes out at eighty is telling you it liked that position; one that comes out at thirty is telling you the opposite, and next year those corms belong somewhere better drained.
Record the storage temperature and where in the house or shed the bag went, too. Losses in storage are common and almost always traced back to somewhere too warm, too damp or too airtight, and you will only spot the pattern if you noted where they were last time.