Moving perennials

Is it possible to move perennials when they are flowering?

In the big bed outside our sitting room lots of pplants are completely overshadowed or not even visible by other plants which have shot up. A lupin, some geraniums and some beautiful clustered bellflowers could all do with being moved to be enjoyed.

Is it too risky?

 

I would say go for it.

There is a risk you might kill them, but there's no reason gardening has to be always risk-free - it's good to be adventurous and against the textbooks occassionally!

Water well first, prepare the hole you're going to move them to in advance, and try to dig up as much of the root as you can so the plant barely knows it's been moved.

 

Funny you should ask that, I had a hosta that was just getting bigger and bigger ,so i lifted it last week and at the moment its in a large pot ,we had torrential rain last Saturday, so its been well watered and i will be splitting it and replanting in the next week or so

It is a risk but if you have to do it ,as you say it was choking others, and keep well watered and possibly out of full sun ,with a little luck it should be fine,

 

You could move them and the plants wll be allright but you might loose this years flowers. If you're careful you might save the geraniums and bellflowers but lupins have very deep tap roots and I don't think you get it out without disturbing it. I would be inclined to leave it until it had finished flowering.

 

I imagine the lupin will probably get it in any move, so don't move those but otherwise why not? It's gonna be cool and wet for the next week apparently so they should have recovered in time before the hot stuff arrives.

 

If you need to move them then do so. If you don't need to then leave it until the Autumn.

You will be watering them all Summer trying to keep them alive, and they will be considerably weakened - which will effect their performance.

 

Just a word of warning. I moved a couple of perennials this time last year and now their blooming performance has been very poor. If you can wait until autumn if at all possible, then do so.

 

As people have indicated, you can't generally move plants when they are flowering. There are however two exceptions - Asters and perennial Lobelias. According to Christopher Lloyd these can both be moved, when in full flower, without any problem as long as they are watered well the previous evening.

You can try with other plants, but you are likely to get mixed success. When you move a complete plant, you usually need to cut back the foliage to compensate for cutting back the roots. And that means loosing flowers.

As Alice and Lollipop have said, Lupins have a tap root and are unlikely to survive any move. Once they have flowered they go black and leave a hole in the border when they are cut down. So I have followed Christopher Lloyd's suggestion and grow them as biennials. That means that after flowering I can throw them away and replace them with something late flowering such as Cosmos, Dahlias, Cleome etc. At the same time I will be growing next year's Lupins from seed, in pots.

 

If I was going to chance it, I'd do it in the evening. In my limited experience, plants suffer less trauma if they are moved in the evening when things are cooler, and there is less going on.

 

Well.. I did it.

The lupin was put in by myself only a month or six weeks ago, and it was so easy to get up, no nasty cracking sounds, so I think I probably got it all up. The bellflower I took the risk with because it was hardly visible, hidden underneath the bachelor buttons, which have gone crazy (when I dug up the plants there I noticed a lot of ash, I'm presuming there had been a bonfire there and the ash has made everything grow like mad!) so I really felt that I was in a no win situation.

They booth look ok this morning, m9oved them last night. Time will tell!!! I water every night anyway, unless we've had rain, as we have a lot of trees and have dry soil if I don't.

 

Good luck! I think it'll be fine.

I moved some nicely maturing annual poppies not so long ago (according to the textbooks, this means Certain Death). They are still alive, and the buds are still growing.

I think the trick is to dig up half your border along with the plant and move the whole chunk so the plant doesn't realise it's been moved.

 

Thank you Andrew.

I agree that sometimes you need to take a risk. I weighed it all up and decided that although there would be a risk, i wasn't getting any enjoyment out of the plants where they were anyway.

Thank you everyone for your advice.

 

I would water around the plant (not the whole bed) every night for a week. Then see how the weather is, twice a week (good soaking of each plant, don't be namby-pamby and just sprinkle the surface!) should be enough.

I would also give liquid feed, preferably as a foliar feed/spray (if you have a suitable product lying around) to help them get what they need without the roots having to work as hard as normal.

Some bonemeal in the planting hole would have helped re-establish the root system - sorry, should have mentioned that before you dug them up!

 

There is some brilliant advice here. Bottom line=the plants have two chances but proper preparation helps.

 

I often move plants ,they are fine if you dig a hole in the new position and water it well,dig your plant with plenty of soil round it pop it in the new place and water.sometimes they don't know they have been moved.