Lantana is a popular, heat-tolerant plant celebrated for its prolific and season-long display of vibrant, clustered flowers. To ensure this continuous color, gardeners employ a simple technique called deadheading. Deadheading involves the removal of spent flowers, which redirects the plant’s energy away from seed production and back toward creating new blooms. This practice is a fundamental part of maintaining the appearance and vitality of your lantana throughout the growing season.
The Purpose of Deadheading Lantana
The act of removing faded blooms stimulates the lantana to produce a fresh flush of flowers, known as rebloom. This occurs because interrupting the plant’s natural reproductive cycle delays the formation of seeds. Once a flower cluster fades, it begins to form small, dark berries containing seeds. Removing these developing seed heads ensures the plant’s resources are dedicated to vegetative growth and flowering, rather than seed development, keeping the plant in its flowering stage longer.
Preparing for the Task
Deadheading should begin as soon as the lantana starts actively growing and flowering, typically from mid-spring until the first hard frost in the fall. Regular inspection of the plant is recommended. Removing spent flower clusters every one to two weeks is often enough to maintain constant bloom.
For this task, you will need a clean, sharp cutting tool, such as a pair of small hand pruners or shears. The use of a sharp tool makes a clean cut, which heals quickly and minimizes stress on the plant. Before starting, wipe down the blades of your tool with a disinfectant solution, such as rubbing alcohol. Sanitizing the tools helps prevent the transfer of any potential plant diseases to your lantana.
Step-by-Step Guide to Deadheading
The most effective method for deadheading lantana is to lightly shear the plant, rather than meticulously picking off individual spent flowers. Lantana’s growth habit responds well to this light trim, which encourages denser branching and a more rounded shape. To begin, look for the faded flower clusters that have lost their vibrant color and started to shrivel or brown.
Using your shears, cut just below the spent flower cluster on the stem. The goal is to make the cut just above a set of healthy leaves or a visible growth node. A node is a slight swelling on the stem where a leaf or new shoot is attached, and cutting above it stimulates the dormant bud to become a new flowering branch.
For a general maintenance trim, remove only the top few inches of the branch, which includes the faded bloom and a small section of the stem. This light shearing removes the spent material while also encouraging the plant to produce a flush of new growth tips. This technique is particularly beneficial for lantana, as new flowers develop on new growth.
If the plant is becoming leggy or appears to have many faded blooms, you can trim back slightly more, but avoid removing more than one-third of the plant’s overall size at any one time. The light shearing method is faster and more efficient than pinching off each bloom by hand, making it the preferred approach.