Getting Gypsophila to Flower, and Cutting It for Drying

Why a healthy looking plant carries no flowers

The classic complaint is a big, vigorous, blue green mound of foliage carrying a handful of flowers, and the cause is nearly always fertility. Manure dug into the bed, a compost mulch, a general fertilizer scattered over the border in spring, or simply planting into ground that was improved for vegetables will all do it. The plant reads a rich soil as a reason to build leaf, and it takes several weeks of no feeding to reverse.

The second cause is shade. Under six hours of direct sun the flowering falls away sharply and the stems lengthen and soften. If the plant is in its first or second year and the shade comes from a neighbor that has grown, cut the neighbor back rather than moving the gypsophila, because a perennial with an established taproot will not survive a move.

The third is simply age. A perennial sown or planted this year is not going to flower properly this year. It is spending the season making a taproot and a woody crown, and that is the right use of its time. Expect the first real flush in its second summer and the best displays from its third onward.

There is one more, easily missed: soil that has drifted back to acid. A plant that flowered well for three years and then thinned out is often standing in ground that has lost its lime, and a surface dressing in autumn brings it back the following summer.

What the flowering season actually looks like

The perennial comes into flower in early to midsummer and gives six to eight weeks of it. What you see is not really individual flowers but a haze: hundreds of blooms a quarter of an inch (6 mm) across on branching wiry stems, so the plant reads as a cloud rather than as a set of blossoms. That is why it works next to heavier flowers and why it is worth siting where it can spill over a hard edge.

The annual is far quicker and far briefer. Eight weeks from sowing to full flower, then four to six weeks of bloom, and then it is finished for good. It will not repeat, and cutting it back does not bring it round; the plant is simply over. This is exactly why succession sowing every three weeks is the standard way of growing it.

Flowers open from the outside of each spray inward over several days, which is what makes the timing of a cut so important. A spray is never all open at once and never will be.

Cut when about half the flowers are open

This is the single rule that decides whether your gypsophila dries well or turns to brown dust. Cut a spray when roughly half its flowers are open and the rest are still tight buds. Cut earlier and the buds never open, leaving a spray of green pinheads. Cut later, with everything wide open, and the fully open flowers shatter as they dry and drop off the stem at a touch.

Cut in the morning after the dew has dried, using sharp snips, and take whole stems back to a fork low in the plant rather than snipping bits off the top. Long stems are what you want for a vase, and cutting to a fork encourages the plant to branch and throw more flowering stems, so a plant that is cut hard flowers more than one that is left alone.

For fresh use, strip the lower leaves, put the stems straight into deep water and leave them in a cool place for a few hours before arranging. Gypsophila lasts a week or more in water if the vase is kept clean. It has a distinctly musty smell for the first day or so, which fades and is not a sign of anything wrong.

1. Judge the spray, not the plant Look at one spray at a time. When about half of its flowers show open petals and half are still hard green buds, that spray is ready. Different sprays on the same plant will be ready over a two week span.
2. Cut long, cut low, cut to a fork Follow the stem down to a branching point well inside the plant and cut just above it. Short stems snipped off the surface leave stubs that die back and give you nothing worth arranging.
3. Bundle loosely, no more than a fist thickness Tie ten to fifteen stems with a rubber band, which keeps gripping as the stems shrink. Packed tighter than that, the middle of the bunch goes moldy instead of drying.
4. Hang upside down in the dark A dry, airy, dark place at room temperature, out of direct sun. Two to three weeks. Darkness keeps the color; sun bleaches the whole bunch to a dull straw within days.

Dried gypsophila is brittle and holds dust. Store finished bunches upright in a box in a dry cupboard, not in a plastic bag, and handle them as little as possible. A bunch dried properly keeps its shape for years.

After the flowers: what to cut and what to leave

Once the perennial's main flush is over, shear the whole plant back by about a third, taking off all the spent flowering stems. Many plants then throw a lighter second flush in late summer, and even where they do not, the plant goes into autumn tidy and dry rather than carrying a mass of dead wet stems over its crown.

Do not cut a perennial hard down to the ground in autumn. Leave three or four inches (8 to 10 cm) of stem above the crown through the winter. It keeps rain from sitting directly on the crown and marks where the plant is, which matters because gypsophila comes up late in spring and is very easily forked through by someone tidying an apparently empty gap.

Pull the annual out completely once it is over. It will not come back, and a bed of dead wiry stems shelters slugs and holds moisture against whatever is growing next to it. If you want seed from it, leave two or three plants standing until the capsules are dry and brown, then pull those too.

Mark the position of every perennial crown with a short cane in autumn and note the date it first showed above ground in spring. It is genuinely late to appear, and knowing your own date stops you writing off a live plant as dead and digging it out.