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By Sarahsmaller

Wellington, New Zealand

We have mostly herbaceous plants and are preparing for the annual pre-winter cut-back of our garden. Something new we added this summer is a patch of Red Hot Poker (Kniphofias) surrounded by Sedum Angelina.

1. The red hot poker is a showy and dramatic plant. If you love growing perennials that give color all summer long, this is the plant for you. Other names for this showy plant are torch lily and poker plant. The botanical name for this plant is kniphofia uvaria and there are more than 70 known species of it.
2. Cut away all the dead or damaged foliage from the Red Hot Poker plants in the early spring. You can also cut the plant down to its base in late fall. Red Hot Poker Plants Red hot poker plants thrive in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 5 through 10.

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Hi, my red hot poker plant has just come to the end of flowering. I have read that I should cut the flower stems down as close to the root as possible but what about the leaves? I have trimmed off most of the dead ones but the green leaves are really long-too long to stand erect so they hang in a messy clump and look very untidy. Can I cut them shorter to tidy up or will this kill them? Thanks

On plant Kniphofia uvaria

• 29 Aug, 2009

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Answers

From Bluestone Perennials - Dead heading may prolong blooming by removing old flower spikes. To improve appearance, cut back foliage by one half. Leave foliage for winter protection and cut back to 3' in spring. Divide in spring.

Cut the flower stems right down, but only cut off around one-third to one-half of the foliage, then mulch around (but not on top of) the plants.

Thanks for that Wagger and Bernieh, was just going to ask the same question, never sure what to do with kniphofia leaves always seem to look messy this time of year wondered if you should cut them back, so thanks, now where are those secateurs :-)

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Care Of Red Hot Poker Plant

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Red Hot Fire Poker Plant

Another inexpensive way of adding to the plant collection for my raised beds is by propagation. My sister explained that there are several ways to propagate plants. So we decided to raid my mum’s garden (with permission).

Dividing Red Hot Pokers

This is a method we used on bigger primroses, hot pokers and iris.

To divide the plant we dug it up after flowering and looked at the base, we picked natural points in the plant for example between leaves, ensuring the piece we were removing had roots and had growth on top and then put the plant back and the piece we had divided into a pot and watered so the soil settled.

When you look closely at this hot poker, you can see it’s made up of lots of sections which look like leeks! We just broke off one of these, with it’s roots and potted it up.

The hot pokers we did the end of last year are doing really well and are creating off shoots themselves which we can divide.

Original section on the right, with two new shoots.

Buddleia Cuttings

These are easier (I was scared id hurt the plant dividing it up) We took cuttings from all sorts like Buddleia “buzz”, Clematis, hardy geraniums just to name a few in case mums reading!

To do these cuttings with sharp scissors/secateurs we took sections of fresh growth and cut just below a leaf joint or node ensuring there is enough stalk to place the first joint into the soil to root from and a second joint on top for the new shoots. Try and avoid any flower buds, but if you can’t find pieces without, you can cut them off.

Next you need to remove the bottom sets of leaves, under the soil they would just root and reducing the above ground leaves will help stop the cutting wilting.

These are then placed in pots with the top leaf joint level with the surface. I poked holes with my finger to get them in.

Then water to settle the soil.

These then go into a green house, or in our case a window sill, and are covered. We like to use sandwich bags as these fit nicely over pots.

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These are cuttings we took the same way last summer all grown up: