Deadheading Flowering Shrubs with a Hard Pruning Leads to a Second Flowering

Sunday, November 21, 2021

August 31, 2021
That right there is the Japanese Spirea in the front landscaping bed, doing its second blooming, after I gave it a hard pruning when it finished its first set of blooms. So, this is just a reminder to myself that when the spirea (both of them) look spent and faded like below:

June 12, 2020
...it is time to give them a terrible haircut, to encourage regrowth. It's sort of like deadheading, but there's so many flowers on this shrub that cutting each individual flower that's passed off would take awhile.

August 31, 2021
Yes, it still looks quite shaggy, but it's due for a hard + shaping pruning again in early spring. That way its new growth can fill out any holes. The spirea, and both the gold mop false cypress, the two Mugo Pines and the yew cone, and the eunymous, and the potentilla, and whatever that layered evergreen pine tree is. Back in June, I figured out how to correctly prune most of the shrubs on the property, but only the euonymus can be pruned in early summer, simply because it's so invasive it doesn't matter. Everything else must wait until early spring for their hard pruning, and then a lighter shaping prune later on in the season once the new growth has come in.

September 16, 2021
The other spirea, which is a lighter pink, is not re-blooming nearly as strongly. But, it is just as shaggy and unkempt as the other. To next spring, and possibly having better-looking shrubbery then!