Spotlight on a star

Because although this hardy shrub is grown widely throughout the UK, it’s almost ignored. Some gardeners would say that’s how it should be – leave it to get on with doing what it’s good at doing.

But weigela is more than just a bit-part player in the shrub border; it’s a bit of a star in its own right.

Having said that, it can be its own worst enemy. No sooner have the lovely red blooms started to appear than the shrub goes in to overdrive, producing new shoots and leaves – it’s almost as if the plant wanted to hide its flowers from prying eyes.

So get out the shears, chop off the new leaves, and the blooms will be visible again. A couple of weeks later and it’s out with the shears again, this time to prune the entire plant because like many shrubs that flower at this time of year, the weigela flowers on wood produced the previous year.

So if you prune it too late in the year, it won’t have time in to grow mature wood for flowering next summer.

And if you prune early in the year (before it blooms) then you’ll be cutting off the flower buds that developed last year, and there will be no flowers until the following year.

As soon as your weigela has finished flowering, prune out all of the flowered stems by about one third of their 
length. This will encourage the shrub 
to produce new shoots which will 
mature through the summer and 
produce plenty of flower buds for the 
next year.

And while you have the shears in your hand, it’s also a good idea to carry out some regeneration pruning.

This is done by cutting back hard, around one in every three main stems – right down to near ground level.

New shoots will soon develop and grow to form a good framework of healthy stems for future years. In subsequent years, again prune out about a third of all the older stems.

It’s this pruning regime which makes the difference between a healthy shrub full of flowers and an equally healthy shrub full of just foliage.

The British weigela national collection is held at Sheffield Botanical Gardens.