Re: Strelitzia dead-heading

At 03:02 PM 8/21/2002, Lindsay, Deborah wrote:
So speaking of pruning, perhaps someone can clue me in on how I dead head Bird-of Paradise? Do you cut the entire flowering stem to the base of the plant or back to a what seem to be nodes? None of my books mention grooming at all other than removal of dead leaves...I had a gorgeous show this spring but it is long over, so now what?

Deborah
Hi Deborah -

As I understand it, you can/should remove the entire stem. When I grew one of these they always produced a new flower stem from the base, not from an old flower stem.

For a non-profit function many years ago, we were given the garden of a famous local house for our big luncheon. Well ahead of time, some of us visited the site to determine what we could do with it, we were dismayed that a huge 'hedge' of Strelitzia in rather poor shape (full of dead, crisped leaves) dominating the entire garden!!! These plants were monsters, with leaves reaching 6-8ft tall and clumps twice as wide.

I organized a large number of volunteers to hand pull out as much of the dead and dying leaves and old flower heads as we could, by grasping them firmly as low down as could be reached and tugging sharply. It took most of one day to do this with 9 people working more or less continuously. Needless to say we all felt like our arms were going to drop off for the next few days!!

The clumps looked rather floppy and 'thin' at the end of all this, and we had enormous piles of debris that had to be disposed of.

One volunteer made sure these clumps were watered deeply once a week (it was a dry winter and the owners were in Europe).

Months later, in the spring, the clumps had sent up thousands of fresh, new leaves and hundreds of huge flower heads, many of them with two 'birds'!! The owners, returning in time to attend the event, were stunned at how beautiful these plants looked!

The removal of older leaves provided light into the crown to inspire more leafy growth. And while more work, I think leaving what leaves we did helped the plants recover more quickly (something to photosynthesize with).

Seán O.

h o r t u l u s a p t u s - 'a garden suited to its purpose'
Seán A. O'Hara fax (707) 667-1173 sean@support.net
710 Jean Street, Oakland, CA 94610-1459, U.S.A.

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