Gadenin日本語Get the appRot is what actually kills them
If corms do not come up, or shoots appear and then collapse, the overwhelmingly likely cause is rot in cold wet soil. Anemones are planted at a time of year when the ground is cool and often saturated, they are planted shallow, and they go in freshly rehydrated with soft surfaces. Every one of those factors favors fungal and bacterial rot, and no amount of feeding or fussing will help a corm that has already gone.
The diagnosis takes thirty seconds. Lift one from the edge of the block. A sound dormant corm is hard and dark with white root initials showing; a rotted one is brown, soft, often slimy, and crushes between finger and thumb with a smell. If two out of five are like that, the block has a drainage problem, not a bad batch.
The fixes are all about water, not chemicals. Raise the bed or plant on a slight ridge, work grit and compost into heavy ground before planting, avoid low spots where water stands after rain, do not overlong the soak, water once at planting and then leave the ground alone until shoots show, and never plant into ground that is already sodden. Where the ground is genuinely bad, start the corms in trays or modules of gritty potting mix somewhere frost-free and plant them out once they have shoots and roots you can see.
The pests worth knowing
Above ground, anemones sit low with soft leaves and long tender stems, which puts them in reach of the usual cool-weather feeders. Most damage happens in the first few weeks, when the plant is small and each leaf lost matters, so this is the period to check every few days.
| Problem | What you see | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Slugs and snails | Shoots grazed to stumps overnight, slime trails, ragged holes | Check after dark, clear hiding places, protect newly emerged shoots |
| Aphids | Clusters on stems and bud necks, sticky leaves, distorted buds | Wash off with water, repeat every few days while numbers are low |
| Cutworms | Whole young plants toppled at soil level, stem chewed through | Search the top inch (2-3 cm) of soil around the plant and remove them |
| Mice and voles | Corms gone from the soil before shoots ever appear, small holes | Plant into wire baskets where these are a known problem |
| Leaf miners | Pale winding tunnels inside leaves | Pick off affected leaves; the plant tolerates a fair number |
| Birds | Petals shredded or torn off newly open flowers | Net or row cover over the block during flowering |
Diseases on the leaves
Powdery mildew shows as a white dusty coating on leaves and stems, usually late in the season when the plants are crowded, the weather is warm and dry and the roots are running short of water. It is unsightly but rarely fatal on a plant that is heading into dormancy anyway. Remove the worst leaves, improve airflow by thinning any neighboring planting, and keep the roots watered; a plant under drought stress is far more susceptible than one that is evenly moist.
Downy mildew is the more serious relative: yellow blotches on the upper leaf surface with a gray or purplish felt underneath, spreading in cool wet weather. Remove and dispose of affected plants rather than composting them, stop overhead watering entirely, and do not plant anemones in that same spot next season.
Rust appears as small orange or brown pustules on the undersides of leaves, sometimes with distorted growth. Pull affected plants out. In all three cases, close spacing and still, humid air are the conditions that let the problem take hold, so the long-term answer is a better position rather than a spray.
A block that has had downy mildew or rust should not be replanted with anemones for two or three years, and corms lifted from it are not worth storing. Start again with fresh corms in different ground rather than carrying the problem forward.
The failures that are not failures
Foliage yellowing and collapsing after flowering is dormancy, not disease. Flowers closing at night and on dull days is normal behavior. A block that stops producing when the weather warms has finished its season rather than failed. Shoots that take four weeks to appear from a cold-soil planting are usually fine; check one corm rather than digging the block up.
Equally, small flowers on short stems in the first year, followed by better ones the next, is common where the corms bought were small. That is a size problem, not a health problem, and lifting and growing the corms on for a season generally fixes it.
What to record when something goes wrong
Note what you saw, where in the bed it was, and the date. Rot concentrated at the low end of a bed is a drainage map you can act on. Slug damage that always hits the block nearest a wall tells you where they are living. Mildew that appears in the same fortnight every year tells you the season is ending earlier than you have been planning for.
Record how many corms in a batch failed as well, not just that some did. A twenty per cent loss is ordinary; a sixty per cent loss in one block and none in another, in the same garden and the same season, is the strongest possible evidence about where anemones should and should not go in your ground.