Gadenin日本語Get the appWhy this plant is cut rather than deadheaded
With most flowering plants you leave the flowers on the plant to be looked at and snip off the dead ones afterwards. Anemones invert that. Each stem carries one flower, the stem is long and clean, and cutting it low signals the plant to send up the next one. A block that is picked over every few days produces markedly more stems than an identical block left to stand, and the difference is not marginal. Heavy picking can roughly double what a planting gives you over a season.
The reason is straightforward. Once a flower is fertilized the plant begins building a seed head, and seed production competes directly with the buds waiting below. Remove the flower before that starts and the resources go straight into the next stem. Leave the whole block to set seed and it will simply stop, usually weeks before it needed to.
The stage to cut at
Cut when the bud has colored up and just started to open, before the flower is flat and wide and before the center is showing much pollen. At that stage the stem is at full length, the flower opens fully in water indoors, and it lasts far longer in a vase than one cut wide open. A flower cut fully open in the garden will close, drop and shed in a couple of days.
Reach down into the plant and cut at the very base of the stem, at soil level, rather than snipping partway up. A stump left behind produces nothing, blocks light from the crown, and rots into the middle of the plant in wet weather. Use snips rather than pulling; a tugged stem lifts the whole crown and loosens the corm.
Anemone flowers open in daylight and close at night and in dull weather, which surprises people who cut a bunch in the morning and find them shut by evening. That is the flower doing what it is meant to do, not a sign that the stems were cut badly.
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Tight bud, no color showing | Too early, stem still lengthening | Leave two or three more days |
| Bud colored, just cracking open | The stage to pick | Cut at soil level |
| Flower flat and wide, center bright | Peak in the garden, past its best for a vase | Cut anyway to keep the plant producing |
| Petals dropping, center swelling | Seed setting, production about to stop | Cut and remove immediately |
| Few new buds, foliage still green | Warmth has ended the flush | Stop cutting, let the foliage feed the corm |
Why a block stops flowering
The commonest reason is heat. Anemones set and open buds in cool conditions, and once days are consistently above about 75F (24C) the plant closes down whatever you do. Nothing is wrong and no treatment will restart it. The remedy belongs to next year, in the form of an earlier planting or a shadier position, and in the meantime the plant is not dying but going dormant.
The second reason is seed. A block left unpicked for a fortnight in mid-flush will slow dramatically. If you have been treating them as a border plant to admire, start cutting or at least removing spent flowers at the base, and production usually picks up again within a week or two if the weather is still cool.
The third is nutrition, usually the wrong sort. Lush foliage, floppy stems and few buds points to too much nitrogen. Short stems and small flowers points to drought during the bud-forming weeks, or to a corm that was small and undernourished to begin with. And a block that flowered thinly from the very start, with weak growth throughout, was often planted into ground that stayed wet and lost part of its root system early.
Anemones grown in a cold frame, tunnel or under frost cloth flower earlier and for longer than the same corms outside, because the cool season under cover starts sooner and the flowers are not battered by rain. This is why so much of the crop for cutting is grown under cover.
Keeping the flowers once they are cut
Cut early in the morning, put the stems straight into a bucket of cool water in the shade, and leave them there for an hour or two before arranging. Anemones take up a great deal of water, so top the vase up daily rather than every few days, and strip anything that would sit below the waterline.
The stems keep growing and bending toward light after cutting, so an arrangement that was even yesterday will be lopsided today. Turning the vase daily evens it out. Expect five to eight days in a vase from flowers cut at the right stage, and about half that from flowers cut wide open.
What to record while it is flowering
Count what you cut. A simple tally per block, kept for one season, is the most useful anemone record there is, because it tells you what a given number of corms actually yields in your conditions rather than what a catalogue claims. Note the date of the first flower and the date the flush ended, and the daytime temperature in the week it stopped.
Note also which block came from which planting batch and how the batches overlapped. That is what lets you decide whether to shift the whole sequence earlier next year, add a fourth batch, or drop one that always ran into heat and produced almost nothing.