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Once the rosettes are established, forget-me-not is close to self-sufficient. It grows through cool, damp weather when nothing is under stress, flowers before summer heat arrives and is finished by the time drought is a problem. It does not need staking, it does not need pinching, and it does not need deadheading in any conventional sense. If you do nothing at all to a patch it will still flower and still spread. The care described below is therefore almost entirely about controlling it rather than helping it.
That is worth saying plainly because a great deal of routine flower care actively harms this plant. Feeding it makes it soft and mildew-prone. Watering it overhead in spring spreads disease through the colony. Crowding it, which happens by default when you leave it to seed, is the cause of most of the problems people blame on the weather.
Water only in a real drought, and never over the leaves
Forget-me-not has a shallow, fibrous root system in the top four to six inches (10 to 15 cm) of soil, so it wilts visibly in a dry spell and recovers quickly once watered. In spring, which is when it matters, natural rainfall almost always covers it. Water only when the leaves are still limp in the cool of early morning, which is the honest sign of drought rather than midday wilting, and then soak the ground thoroughly rather than sprinkling.
Water at the base, under the foliage. The leaves and stems are covered in short stiff hairs that hold water for hours, and wet foliage in the still, mild air of spring is exactly the condition powdery mildew and downy mildew want. A colony watered overhead in the evening will turn gray a fortnight earlier than one watered at the roots in the morning. In containers the plant dries out fast and does need regular watering, but the rule about keeping the leaves dry still holds.
| Situation | Watering | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Established patch in open ground, spring | None unless a fortnight without rain | Rainfall covers it; extra water softens growth |
| Autumn rosettes after sowing | Water in dry spells until established | Shallow roots, not yet down into moist soil |
| Dry shade under shrubs | One deep soak a month in a dry spring | Shrub roots take the moisture first |
| Container or window box | Whenever the top inch (2.5 cm) is dry | Limited root volume, dries out in a day of wind |
| Any position, once flowering ends | Stop entirely | The plant is dying anyway; wet foliage only spreads mildew |
Do not feed it
Forget-me-not flowers well on poor ground and badly on rich ground. Nitrogen produces large, soft, dark leaves at the expense of flower, lengthens the stems until the plant flops over its neighbors, and makes the foliage far more susceptible to mildew. A patch growing in a border that gets a spring feed for the roses will always look coarser and go over sooner than the same plant self-sown into gravel or at the foot of a wall.
The one exception is a container, where the compost is exhausted by the second year and the plants go pale and small. A single weak liquid feed as the flower buds show is enough there. In open ground, if the plants are genuinely yellow and stunted, the problem is usually compaction or waterlogging at the crown rather than a lack of nutrients, and forking a little grit into the soil does more than fertilizer.
Never mulch over the crowns of first-year rosettes. A thick mulch traps moisture around the growing point through winter and rots the plant at exactly the stage when you need it to survive intact.
The one decision: pull them, or let them seed
This is the whole of forget-me-not management. As the flowers fade the plant begins setting seed along the coiled flowering stems, and the seed is ready within a few weeks of the last flower opening. Pull the plants out before then and the colony stays roughly where you put it. Leave them standing and you will get seedlings through the entire bed, in the gravel, in the cracks of paving and in the pots standing nearby. Neither choice is wrong, but drifting between them by accident is how gardens end up with forget-me-not as a permanent weed.
The practical middle course, and the one most people settle on, is to pull the great majority as the flowers fade and deliberately leave two or three of the best plants standing in the part of the bed where you want the colony to continue. That gives you far more seed than you need, keeps the spread roughly in one place, and removes the mildewed foliage before it becomes an eyesore. Pull, do not cut: the whole root comes out easily in damp soil, and a cut stump often pushes a second flush of weak flowering shoots that seed anyway.
If you decide to pull, do it while the plants are still slightly green and before they turn brown and brittle. A brown plant sheds seed everywhere as you lift it, and the seeds have tiny hooks that catch on your sleeves and gloves and travel with you across the garden. Lifting damp, half-green plants into a bucket rather than dragging them across the bed is the difference between removing a colony and distributing one.
- Decide before the flowers fade, not after Walk the patch while the blue is still good and mark the two or three plants you will leave for seed. Once the whole patch is brown the decision has already been made for you.
- Pull the rest whole, in damp soil Grip low at the crown and pull steadily. The root system is shallow and fibrous and lifts in one piece, taking the seed heads with it rather than shaking them off.
- Lift into a bucket held close to the plant Do not carry armfuls across the border. Every step with a seeding plant in your hands is another patch of seedlings next spring.
- Brush yourself and the dog down away from beds The seeds hook onto clothing, laces and animal coats and are the main reason colonies appear in parts of the garden nobody planted.
- Rake the ground where you want no seedlings Shallow raking a fortnight later brings the shed seed to the surface where it dries, and pulls out the first flush of seedlings while they are small.
Keep a note of what you pulled and what you left
Record the date you pulled the patch, roughly how many plants you left standing for seed, and where they were. The following spring, compare that against where the seedlings actually came up. Almost everyone finds the colony has moved several feet downhill or downwind of where the parent plants stood, and knowing which direction it drifts in your garden tells you where to leave the seeding plants next time.
Also note the date the flowers first went over, because that is your deadline every year. In most gardens it is remarkably consistent, within a week or so from year to year, and having last year's date written down means you act while the choice is still yours rather than a fortnight late with a brown patch and seed already on the ground.