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Pruning persicaria
Hi, my friend has two large clumps of ground covering persicaria around her pond. The spires of pink and red flowers looked fantastic last year but now the leaves are all red (rusty coloured) and look burnt. There seems to be a tiny bit of new green growth coming from a few of the stems but not enough to cut back to and certainly nothing sprouting in the middle of the plants. Surely she shouldn't shear everything off? But the leaves look awful, they look dead. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
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Mine looks exactly the same. You can lightly rake it to remove dead foliage but be careful not to uproot it and otherwise just be patient. It will recover and regrow as things warm up.
Those were my thoughts exactly. It's too dense to rake though (and the clumps are only a couple of feet across and they've spread over the rockery around the pond so not easy to rake). I'm so used to cutting back hard to the new growth or at least pruning back to a healthy shoot along the stem but this just looks like a clump of dead leaves with one or two green leaves here and there. I can't find any references to pruning it back so maybe best to leave it alone and hope that's not the wrong thing to do!
I might wait a bit and see where the new growth comes then cut it back to some good shoots.
In the sticks near Peterborough
I find that it very quickly goes from a mound of dead brown stuff, into a lovely mound of foliage and flowers, with only a small amount of tidying.
When you don't even know who's in the team
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