Coneflowers, or Echinacea, are a wonderful addition to any garden or yard. Growing coneflowers is relatively simple, and their care is low-maintenance. While coneflowers are low-maintenance and don’t necessarily require any pruning, using a few simple pruning techniques can enhance their beauty, manage their slow but steady growth, and extend the plant’s blooming season.
Method 1: Deadheading Spent Flowers
Step 1: Encourage Future Growth
- Cut Fading Flowers: Once a coneflower plant turns brown, the flower will quickly shrivel up and die. Use pruning shears to cut off the spent flower and its stem, a process known as “deadheading.”
- Trace the Stem: Trace down the spent flower’s stem until you reach the next lateral stem with a blooming flower or bud, and then cut the stem just above the joint.
- Timing: The best time of year for deadheading will vary based on the coneflower blooming season where you live. Plan to start deadheading about 2 weeks after the first blooms appear and continue throughout the blooming season.
Step 2: Limit Self-Seeding
- Reduce Seed Production: Once a flower fades, the coneflower plant expends energy producing seeds that will eventually fall from the spent flower and sprout new coneflowers in the same area. Cutting coneflowers once they’re shriveled reduces the energy spent on seed production, which may result in more blooms in the future that are longer-lasting and brighter.
- Control Spread: Deadheading also reduces the number of seeds falling to the ground, which can help keep your coneflowers from claiming more garden territory.
Step 3: Natural Spread
- Let Flowers Spread Naturally: If you don’t mind how the coneflower section of your garden spreads, let the wilted flower and seeds fall where they are. This will give you a natural flower meadow look and invite birds to your yard.
- Divide Plants: Each year you leave the coneflowers alone, their area will grow larger. After 3 to 4 years, you may be ready to divide your coneflower plants and replant some of them elsewhere.
Method 2: Cutting Back Plants Annually
Step 1: Use Proper Tools
- Pruning Shears or Hedge Clippers: You don’t have to get fancy here—simply place your shears or clippers as close to the ground as you can and cut down as many stems as you like (or all of them). Pruning shears will work in any instance, but hedge clippers might make the job quicker if you have a lot of coneflowers to prune.
Step 2: Aesthetic Choice
- Fall Pruning: Each fall, your coneflower plants will die off, leaving behind brown stems and wilted flowers. Some gardeners prefer pruning the flower at this stage to keep their yard looking well-groomed.
- Reblooming: Coneflowers will rebloom in the spring whether or not you cut away the dead plant material.
Step 3: Timing Preference
- Late Fall or Early Spring: The coneflower plant doesn’t care whether you prune it to the ground or not, and it also doesn’t mind whether you prune it down right after a growing season or right before the next one. The choice is up to you.
- Aesthetic and Seed Control: You may decide that pruning in the fall makes your garden look better, and it might also reduce the number of seeds that make it to the ground (and thus limit coneflower expansion). Alternatively, if you’d like to provide your local birds with some yummy seeds before winter comes, you can wait until the next spring (before any signs of life return to the plant) to chop it down.
Method 3: Pruning to Extend Blooming Season
Step 1: Promote Growth
- Wait for Buds: Coneflowers can bloom at different times based on your local climate and conditions. Look for a surge in growth in your coneflower patch, noticing any new buds. Then, cut away dried stems to make room for the new flowers to grow.
- Timing: If you do this pruning technique too early—before any buds have appeared—it will make little or no impact on extending the blooming season of your coneflowers. If you do it too late—once numerous buds have appeared—you’ll simply be chopping off flowers shortly before they open up.
Step 2: Extend Blooms
- Cut Main Stems: For instance, if you have a 2 ft (61 cm) circle of coneflowers growing against a fence, divide the circle in half, parallel to the fence. If all the stems are roughly 2 ft (61 cm) high, cut those in the front half of the circle down to about 16 inches (41 cm) high with pruning shears.
- Promote Flower Buds: Cut each main stem just above the lateral stem to help produce a flower bud faster.
- Aggressive Pruning: If you want to be a bit more aggressive in your attempt to extend your blooming season, divide the coneflower stems into 3 sections, then prune down 1 section by a third and another in half.
Step 3: Deadhead Un-pruned Stems
- Monitor Blooms: The stems you didn’t prune down will probably begin to bloom within a week or two. Once the flowers do start blooming, check daily for spent flowers and deadhead them—that is, cut the flower and stem off just above the junction with the next lateral stem.
- Energy Redirection: In this case, deadheading helps direct energy toward flower production in the stems you pruned down.
Step 4: Extend Blooming Season
- Staggered Blooming: Pruning essentially stunts coneflower growth, causing them to fall a few weeks behind their annual flowering process. This means that as the un-pruned half of your plant stops flowering for the season, the pruned half will keep producing beautiful flowers for a few weeks past its typical season.
- Extended Season: For example, coneflowers will bloom for about 1 month in many locales. Therefore, this pruning process can potentially extend the blooming season from 1 to 2 months.
By following these steps, you can ensure that your coneflowers remain healthy, vibrant, and full of beautiful flowers throughout the year. Happy gardening! 🌺🌸