The Best Way To Deadhead Hibiscus Flowers For Endless Blooms

The striking flowers of hibiscus (Hibiscus spp.) are a summertime delight. With eye-catching colors ranging from deep red to variations on yellow, blue, and white, this bushy perennial works equally well as a single specimen or a spectacular mass planting. Keeping the short-lived blooms vibrant and bountiful all season long requires using a maintenance trick that's utilized on many flowering plants: deadheading, This isn't as ominous a process as it sounds. It simply means removing the flowers once they're spent, either by hand or with garden pruners. Deadheading by hand works best with hibiscus.

Deadheading does more than tidy up the showy plant so that it looks prettier, though that is one of the primary reasons to do it. Removing dead flowers allows the plant to stop pouring resources into creating its blooms and seedpods and to redirect those resources to other parts of the plant. Hibiscus self-seed, meaning new plants grow from the seeds the plant scatters. By deadheading the flowers, you've prevented it from creating the seedpods that become new bushes, but there's no harm in letting a few seeds form to save for new hibiscus. By deadheading your hibiscus, you will also be promoting new growth, and that means more blooms into the fall.

Keep in mind that deadheading and pruning are different processes. Deadheading only applies to removing the flowers. Pruning involves cutting away dead or dying branches, shaping the bush, or making changes to the plant that improve its general health. The best time, and how to prune varies from plant to plant. 

To deadhead your hibiscus, pinch the fading flowers off the stem at the base of the bloom. The process is time-consuming because, done right, it continues from the time the plant first blooms until it dies back in the fall. You'll need to do it regularly, but if you don't have the time to do it daily, you can deadhead every few days and remove more spent blooms in a single session. Deadheading by hand works best for hibiscus because the new flower buds grow close together on the stems. If one bud turns into a bloom before the others, you might accidentally cut off the buds that haven't unfurled yet by using pruners. There is no rule against using pruners if you'd rather use that tool. Just be careful not to cut off buds while you're removing the flowers.

Hibiscus flowers attract pollinators such as hummingbirds and butterflies to your yard, but the bush also provides habitat for native bees. In the autumn, when you've finished with your season-long task of keeping your hibiscus healthy and beautiful, one last chore will provide an important benefit for the environment. Cut your hibiscus back to between one and two feet above the ground. The dead stems provide nesting space for some native bees.