I have a beautiful clematis in full bloom right now. Do I need to
dead head the spent blooms to make it bloom again? It is Clematis
‘Candida.’
In researching this question, I used Raymond Evison’s
excellent 1998 book, The Gardener’s Guide to Growing Clematis. Your
Clematis lanuginosa ‘Candida’ is considered a mid-season, large-flowered
type, and it often reblooms, according to Evison. In the chapter on
cultivation, he says, “Some clematis growers prefer to remove spent
flowerheads to encourage further crops of flowers, especially with the
early large-flowered single, double, and semi-double clematis. Certainly,
if the old flowers are removed with a length of stem with 2-3 nodes, new
growth will appear and a further crop of flowers will be produced. When
this is done, it is important to keep the clematis well watered and fed.
The only drawback…is that the attractive seedheads on this group of
clematis will be lost. A compromise can be achieved by removing only 50
per cent of the spent flowerheads…”