The vibrant colors of zinnia flowers are a highlight in any garden. However, when these blooms start to fade and lose their color—or even turn brown—it’s easy to start panicking. Should you cut the blooms? Or should you leave them be?

Ultimately, the best solution is to snip the spent, faded flowers—a process known as deadheading. This will encourage the plant to refocus its energy on producing new blooms, so your garden will be awash in color again in no time. Here’s how you should do it, according to gardening experts.

Why Should You Cut Zinnias?

“Deadheading your fading or spent zinnia flowers will help the plant produce even more blooms, and keep the plant looking healthy and vibrant,” says Steven Engel, regional account manager at PanAmerican Seed. 

There are other benefits to deadheading as well. It also lightens the flower canopy, so the blooms are less likely to fall over in the rain or wind, says Lisa Mason Ziegler, author of The Cut Flower Handbook.

Removing older blooms can even increase airflow, minimizing the risk of disease and pests. “[It] decreases the chance for Botrytis, an airborne fungus that lives on dead organic material and can make a plant rot,” adds Engel.

How to Do It

Ready to get started? Here’s how to properly deadhead your zinnias so they come back more vibrant than ever.

Look for Spent Flowers

It’s time to deadhead once a flower begins to fade, or you notice the edges of the petals start to turn brown.

“As the blooms age, they fade in color and develop seed; they become heavier and often hang lower on the plant from the weight,” says Ziegler. Many older flowers will also start to develop spots or nibble bites from insects. “The centers of the flowers tend to age first and begin to look dirty,” she adds.

Know Where to Snip

The place you snip the bloom will determine where the next bud emerges. The way you deadhead zinnias changes depending on whether they’re for cut flowers or to enjoy in your garden.

For landscape planting: “Make the cut above two leaves to generate new sprouts,” says Ziegler. For a cut flower garden: “Make the cuts deeper on the plant to generate more long, straight stems.”

Remove Spent Blooms

Snip zinnias with garden shears or scissors for a clean cut, or pinch them off with your fingers. If you’re cutting zinnias for their fresh flowers, then Engel suggests only using scissors to prune them. 

When to Deadhead

Deadheading zinnias is an ongoing task. “It begins as soon as the first blooms age out and continues through the season,” says Ziegler. “Doing it on a regular basis, like a Saturday morning job, keeps the plant in its best condition.”

Tons of tips on growing peony flowers with ease.

This beautiful flowering perennial is easy to grow once you find the perfect spot in your garden. 

Peonies are one of my all time favorite cut flowers — the blooms are so full and lush and sometimes incredibly fragrant! Even the foliage is a deep, pretty green…the combination makes for stunning bouquets and arrangements.

I’m sharing all the tips you’ll need to grow these gorgeous flowers! Peonies can be a bit finicky at first, but once they’re established you will rarely need to touch them again.

They are seriously one of the most glorious flowers I’ve ever seen. So fluffy and delicate. 

And the scent — if you’re lucky enough to have a type of peony with fragrance, it is truly intoxicating. 

Where do peonies grow best? 

Peonies grow best in plant zones 3-8. These plants don’t do quite as well in the south, as they need a good chill over the winter. (Keep this in mind when planting as well…more on that below.)

They enjoy a well-draining soil, but at the same time, they do quite well in our thick, clay soil in Indiana. So who knows! 

I always add a layer of mulch around the plant, but in the early spring I clear just a bit of the mulch away from the new growth coming through the soil. 

Peonies are finicky about how they’re planted.

Peony plants are notoriously hard to transplant once established. A friend of mine was giving away a ton of plants years ago (see my free hosta garden here) and she had this big, beautiful peony bush I dug up and took home. It was massive! I was giddy, but it died almost immediately.

If you attempt to transplant, do it in the fall. I’d say late September or early October would be ideal. Keep in mind if it does stay alive after moving it, it may not bloom the first year.

If you’re starting with a new plant in a pot, be sure to plant your peony roots fairly close to the soil surface — only about two inches deep. This allows the plant to go dormant in the winter and save up energy for tons of blooms the next spring.

(This need for cold temps is why they don’t usually do as well in year-round warmer climates.)

I have a peony that has not bloomed as much as I’d like over the years, and it probably needs to be moved up closer to the surface just a bit. 

If your bush has plenty of lush, green leaves but no blooms — the plant depth is most likely the culprit. 

When should I cut peonies? 

I find if you cut peony blooms too soon they will not continue to open up. I get better results when I wait until the blooms are about halfway open. 

There’s a “marshmallow” trick you can use as well — if you squeeze the bud between two fingers and it has some give like a marshmallow, it’s OK to cut. 

If it’s hard, you’ll want to wait. 

I find even this bloom to be too tight: 

I have much better luck when I wait till they’re about halfway open like so:

I’ve heard there are a few tricks to get the tighter buds to open up, but if you just wait another day or so they’ll be ready anyway.

How do I get ants off my blooms?

Peony blooms typically have a lot of ants hiding in the folds of the flower. These bugs do not harm the plant, in fact they help to protect it. 

I don’t recommend using any insect repellant on the plant or near them — at least in the spring when they are blooming. It’s an old wive’s tale that ants help to open the buds. They do eat away at the nectar, but this process doesn’t open the flower. 

Ants are still quite helpful to the plant!

At the very least, ants are territorial and will guard the peony buds from other pests that like to eat the blooms.

Every year as my peony bushes bloom, I waiver back and forth on cutting them and enjoying them inside, or leaving them to add beautiful color to our landscape. 

How to stop your peony stems from drooping. 

The only problem with the gorgeous, huge peony blooms is that they get heavy! Once the buds start opening, the stems can’t handle the weight and will lean to the ground: 

This isn’t a big deal, as the stems are pretty strong. But if the bloom sits against the mulch or any surface for too long, that part of the flower will start to die off. 

To prevent the droop, you can place a tomato cage over the plant as it’s starting to grow. I’m going to try that trick next year!

How long do peony shrubs bloom?

The peony only blooms once a year in the late spring to early summer. Ours typically bloom in the last week of May to the first week of June. (I’m sure this timeline varies by climate.)

The rest of the year the plant is a lovely dark-leaved bush. It’s a full, pretty plant and I love how it looks in our landscaping even after the blooms are gone. 

I typically cut down our bushes to ground level at the end of the season after the first frost. The leaves don’t take well to the cooler weather, so they will die back and not look great. 

You can also cut them back in early spring if you don’t mind the dead looking plant all winter.  

The great thing about this plant is once you have it in a spot it likes, you really don’t need to touch it again. You don’t even really need to use fertilizer on them. I feed lightly once in the spring (before they start blooming) and that’s it. 

Do you grow these beauties? They are the Indiana state flower and grow everywhere here — they love our crazy weather!