Pruning Leucadendron and Cutting It for the Vase: Cut Right After the Bracts Fade

Read the plant, not the calendar

A conebush colors the tips of stems that grew the previous spring and summer. Cut those stems in late summer or fall and you remove next season's display. The window for pruning is when the bracts fade and new buds swell, roughly late winter to late spring in mild climates. Let the plant tell you.

Harvest stems while they are in color

Colored stems are the cut flower. Safari Sunset was bred for the trade and holds two to three weeks in water, then dries for months. For a potted plant, cutting colored stems a few at a time through winter is the gentlest way to prune.

1. Leave leafy nodes below the cut Cut above a point with two or three leafy nodes remaining. Bare old wood below the leaves rarely resprouts.
2. Cut in the cool of the morning Cut early, plunge the stems into water right away, strip leaves below the waterline and change the water every two or three days.
3. Dry upside down for dried flowers Cut at peak color and hang in bunches in an airy, shaded place for two to three weeks. Color dulls a little but the shape holds for a long time.

Cutting back after the bracts fade

Once the color has gone, shorten the plant by about a third. Always cut above a leafy node and never into bare old wood; conebushes resprout poorly from old stems and a hard renovation can be fatal.

1. Remove dead and weak stems first Take out dead wood, thin inward-pointing twigs and crossing stems at their base to open the center to air.
2. Shorten the stems that carried bracts Cut each flowered stem back to a leafy node, removing no more than a third, and even up the outline of the plant.
3. Keep the lower foliage Stripping lower leaves leaves a bare base that will not refill. Lighten the top and leave the skirt.
4. Let cuts dry After cutting thick stems, keep the plant out of rain for a few days so the wounds seal rather than rot.

Tip-prune young plants for more stems

In the first year or two, pinching the growing tips doubles the number of branches and therefore future bracts. Pinch the top 1 in (2 to 3 cm) of a new shoot with your fingers or snips between spring and early summer. Treat pinching as a light job for branching; do not use it to shorten the plant. Pinched tips can be rooted as cuttings but strike slowly, so take proper cuttings if propagation is the aim.

1. When new shoots reach 4 to 6 in (10 to 15 cm) Pinch out the top inch. Two or three side shoots will break from below the pinch.
2. Finish by early summer Shoots pinched by early summer have time to extend and set bracts for fall. Later pinching produces stems that miss the season.
3. Full sun afterward New side shoots take two to three weeks to appear. Keep the plant in sun, water once dry, and do not feed.

Keeping a potted plant to size

Even a large cultivar like Safari Sunset stays at 3 to 5 ft (1 to 1.5 m) in a pot with a yearly cutback. The trick is not to chop to a fixed height but to shorten the whole plant by a third and take only the longest shoots a little deeper. One hard cut costs you nearly all of next year's color.

No color this year? Here is how to recover

If you cut in summer or pruned too hard, the plant skips a season of bracts. It is not dying. Leave it unpruned until after the following bloom and let the spring and summer shoots run. Do not try to buy color back with fertilizer; a phosphorus feed at this point turns one bad year into a dead plant. Fix light and drainage instead.

1. Skip pruning for a year Remove dead wood only. The shoots that extend over summer carry the next display.
2. Secure full sun Color depends on light. From fall to spring give it all-day sun and thin only stems that shade each other.
3. Keep notes Record when and how much you cut. The two dates worth logging every year are when bracts first color and when you cut back.