Missed the Chelsea Chop? Embrace the Hampton Hack!

If you missed the window for the Chelsea Chop in May, don’t worry! That handy technique, timed with the Chelsea Flower Show, helps extend the flowering season of herbaceous plants.

But it’s not too late to give your garden a boost. You can rejuvenate tired July borders by using the Hampton Hack. This method coincides with the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival and is perfect for revitalising your plants now.

Shrubs that respond well to the Hampton hack include:

Philadelphus
Weigela
Helianthemums

These can all take quite tough mid-summer pruning, which will prolong their life and stop them from becoming unattractively untidy or too big for their boots.

Herbaceous plants:

Alchemilla mollis
Astrantias
Herbaceous Geraniums
Nepeta

The degree of cutting back is specific to each species but the closer to the flowering time you prune, the greater the delay in flowering. Doing the ‘Hampton Hack’ can delay the flowering of perennials by four to six weeks. You can either prune all the stems on a clump, which delays all the flowers, or just half of them, which spreads the plant’s flowering over a longer period. This can have some positive results:

The plants are not so tall and leggy
They need less staking
The flowers are smaller but more numerous

This happens because the removal of the top shoots enables the side shoots to branch out (the top shoots would normally inhibit the side shoots by producing hormones in a process called apical dominance). Using this method, along with regular feeding and watering, ensures beds and borders look tidy throughout summer.

After Lupins and Delphiniums have finished flowering, chop them down to about 30 cm in height, apply a mulch around their base and give them a generous drink of water. They’ll start into growth again and may produce additional smaller flowers on shorter stems later on in the year, and you’ll have new foliage to look at instead of a yellowing mess.