Most gardeners know that pruning or cutting back their plants is a healing way to ensure more regrowth in their garden. Removing deadweight helps with nutrient availability to the rest of the garden, and in the case of vegetables, sometimes more blooms will come after pruning.
Pansies will not rebloom or regenerate from their stems if cut back. However, they may rebloom if you are deadheading rather than just cutting or pruning. It’s important to cut back your pansies and other plants to give the blooming flowers more space and nutrients to grow.
In the rest of this article, I’ll talk about the difference between pruning, cutting back, and a strategy called deadheading. Then, we’ll talk about the benefits of deadheading your plants.
Cutting Back Pansies for Rebloom
Pansies are annual flowers that produce a single blooming season before they die. They can be grown in the ground or in containers and bloom for a short time before dying once their final flower opens. Pansies are often grown as bedding plants but can also be grown in the ground once the weather is warm enough to make up for their short life span.
Your pansies will not rebloom if cut back. They can only be grown once, and unlike other plants or flowers, new blooms won’t regenerate from the cut stems of your pansies. However, you can promote growth through deadheading and possibly pruning. Though I’ll use the language of “rebloom” or “regrowth” in this article, I don’t mean it in the sense that any stems you cut will just grow a new flower. Instead, it’ll encourage new blooms to grow.
Pansies Are Annual Plants
Annual plants tend to grow very quickly, with some flowering within a few weeks of germination. They can be grown from seed or transplanted from a nursery. However, if you want to get an annual plant to rebloom or regrow after its first growing season, there are some steps you’ll need to take before it starts to flower again.
Annual plants don’t grow back every year because they exhaust their food supply during their first growing season and then die back in the winter or early spring. Unlike perennials, they don’t come back every season.
Deadheading vs. Cutting Back Your Pansies
Deadheading and cutting back are two different things. Deadheading refers to cutting off the faded flowers of a plant or flower bed. This is done for aesthetic reasons and to encourage more blooms later in the season. If you want your pansies to bloom, deadhead them by removing their spent flowers with pruning shears or scissors.
However, if you want more control over your plants’ bloom cycles (and don’t mind sacrificing some of their beauty), cut back your pansies after they finish flowering. This approach will allow new growth on your plants in time for next year’s growing seasons. At the same time, keep in mind that this method also means that they won’t look as nice while trying to produce new blooms.
The overall health of your pansies will be improved by deadheading. Additionally, deadheading may encourage more blooms to occur in a shorter period because you have removed older blooms that would otherwise hold nutrients needed for new buds to form and grow.
This isn’t to say cutting back your pansies or other plants is bad. There’s a time and place for it. However, if your goal is to have your pansies bloom, cutting back is not the ideal strategy. If reblooming is the goal, you could do whatever strategy you like, keeping in mind that pansies are not the type of flower that rebloom.
Deadheading Your Pansies
If you are deadheading your pansies, it is important to remember that this can help keep your plant healthy. When plants have dead flowers or leaves, they become weaker and more vulnerable to disease and pests. Removing these damaged sections of the plant can prevent the spread of diseases like botrytis (gray mold) or anthracnose, which can be detrimental to your pansy if left untreated.
Additionally, cutting off the old blooms from your pansies at least once a month will help prevent them from becoming overgrown with too many new stems sprouting from one point on the plant. This is particularly important for container-bound plants since crowding will stunt their growth and cause them to become top-heavy, which could cause them to tip over and break branches off in strong winds or storms later in the season.
Deaheading your pansies is only one part of keeping them healthy. You’ll need to take special care of them during the summer. To get a better understanding of how to take care of your pansies in the summer, check out this article: 4 Things to Do With Pansies in the Summer
How To Deadhead, Prune, or Cut Back Your Pansies
Pruning your pansies will help your growing plants get more soil nutrients and provide them more room to grow. If you have a lot of pansies, you can easily prune them by taking off the dead shoots and any side buds that haven’t bloomed yet and even removing the flowers when they are at their peak so that the plant focuses on growing more leaves instead of blooming.
Even if you don’t plan on keeping your pansies for long periods of time, this process is still recommended because it improves the overall health of your plants and helps them produce more flowers in less time!
A simple snip will remove any petals that have fallen off or started to fade in color after being touched by raindrops or dew drops on a damp morning (these can promote mold growth). It’s best if you take care of this task while they’re still young because once they get bigger than 3-4 inches tall, it becomes much harder—if not impossible—to reach inside their center where all those tiny flowers are hiding away!
Remember that if you want to keep them blooming, you should leave at least two flowers on each stem. If you don’t want a lot of blooms but still want to keep the plant healthy, cut back the stems by about 1/4 of the length of the leaves. This will encourage new growth and allow for more flowers in the future.
When Should I Cut Back Pansies?
As mentioned above, cutting back your pansies is not the same as pruning or deadheading your pansies. Pansies only bloom once, so cutting them won’t regenerate new flowers at the top of your stems. However, deadheading can still help you grow more pansies, as they will receive more nutrients from the soil and have more room to grow.
You should cut back pansies when they are spent to encourage new blooms. This means that the blooms have already had their life and are now wilting. Cutting back pansies or deadheading them encourages more of the flowers to bloom.
However, with all that being said, you don’t have to cut back, prune, or deadhead your plants if you don’t want to. Annual plants like pansies have a short lifespan and will wilt and die before the next season regardless. You can lengthen their lifespan to the end of the season by cutting back, pruning, and deadheading.
To summarize, deadheading can help your plants but isn’t required. Deadheading is the removal of flowers after they have bloomed. It’s not the same as pruning, which involves cutting back plants to promote new growth. To deadhead your pansies, simply snip off any spent blooms using scissors or clippers. When you do so, avoid nicking any buds that haven’t yet opened—these will produce new flowers later in the season.
To get a better idea of how to trim your pansies properly, take a look at the YouTube video below:
Using pruning shears is important if you plan on pruning, deadheading, or cutting back your pansies.
Conclusion
So there you have it: how to properly trim your pansies to encourage regrowth. Your pansies won’t rebloom when cut back, but you’ll help encourage some new blooms to form. Your pansies won’t have to fight each other for resources, and they won’t be as weighed down when the spent blooms are off of your plants.
