Shutterstock.com / By markus spiske
garden tip: first, make things worse
21.07.2023 - 23:12 / awaytogarden.com
I‘M BUSY MAKING BAD SITUATIONS WORSE THESE DAYS, which is exactly what has to be done to bring any garden from now to a visually pleasing high summer and fall. It’s not unlike cleaning your closet: Things have to get pulled apart and look a lot messier before they get better. Really. The butchery around here extends beyond the huge swaths of beheaded bigroot geranium (Geranium macrorrhizum), above. Want the hit list? Feeling brave?Some euphorbias, particularly the basic early spring yellow species called polychroma, will start to flop open and get mildewy here if they don’t get a brutal cutback, so you can see (left) what I’ve done to them (same thing I do again in earliest spring before new growth begins).The new red-foliage polychroma cultivar, ‘Bonfire,’ seems to stand up better to summer, so I’m not chopping it down. Will I regret it? Don’t know…only my second year with the plant, so it’s all an experiment.
Which is what cutbacks are: You observe what is going on, and if it’s not looking good, you consider administering a haircut.
The pulmonarias were shorn to the ground after flowering last month, and already have a new set of showy leaves (instead of tattered, about-to-mildew old ones). They would have grown a new set right up and over the old, but I prefer to just shear them, rather than fussily deadheading each flower stem.
Perennial salvias, like the popular ‘May Night’ and the nemorosa varieties ‘Snow Hill’ and ‘Caradonna,’ can do with a good, hard cutback when they’re done blooming. A new rosettes of foliage will be emerging down below, and a lower-impact second flush of bloom will eventually be mustered.
Catmints (Nepeta) look a mess when they pass their first major bloom, so hack them back I do (again, same
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