Removing rosemary flowers as soon as they appear can be a way to delay the flowering process and force the plant to stay in the growing stage for longer than it otherwise would have. However, you must remove the flowers correctly as it can otherwise damage the plant, which is precisely why I wrote this article. I want to teach you the best way to remove the flowers from your rosemary.
The best way to do it depends if there are a lot of flowers on your plant or only a few.
- If there are only a few flowers on your rosemary, the easiest and safest way to remove them is to cut them off using clean and sharp pruning shears. Alternatively, you can pinch them off with your fingers although the risk of damaging the plant is higher with this method. Pruning shears ensures a clean cut.
- If there are many flowers on your rosemary, the easiest way to remove them all is to prune your plant by cutting back the foliage including the flowers, by up to a third. That way, you remove the majority of the flowers. Any flowers still on the plant can be removed individually.
I explain precisely how to do it depending on your situation in this article where I also include illustrations to show you precisely where to cut.
Before we get started, I must mention that while stopping your rosemary from flowering has advantages, it also has disadvantages. So if you aren’t completely certain that you want to do it, here are some pros and cons you should know about since the decision you make affects how your plant behaves and grows significantly.
If you already know with certainty that you want to remove the flowers, you can skip this next part as I explain how to do it right after.
Why You Should Consider Letting Your Rosemary Flower
You probably found this article because you want to stop your rosemary from flowering by removing the flowers, but before I explain the best way to do that, I want to make sure that you are making an informed decision as it isn’t always the right thing to do.
I almost always allow my rosemary to flower as soon as possible. I do this for some specific reasons.
Flowering rosemary attracts pollinating insects which can pollinate your garden plants, thereby enabling them to produce fruit and seeds, which leads to your garden being more productive as a whole. Letting the plant flower also requires significantly less work than stopping it and causes the plant to become more visually appealing.
The primary advantage of removing flowers from rosemary is that it delays the flowering process, thereby extending the growth period and increasing the amount of new foliage the plant produces overall.
If you aren’t sure what to do, head over to my complete guide to rosemary flowering where I dive much deeper into the topic. In the article, I also cover the topics of why rosemary flowers in the first place, what happens to the plant, and much more.
If you’ve decided to remove the flowers, keep reading. I will explain the best way to do it now depending on how many there are. The best method depends if there are only a few flowers or if there are a lot, so read whatever is relevant to you.
Best Way To Remove Rosemary Flowers if There Are Many
Rosemary can produce a tremendous amount of flowers and if that’s the situation you’re in and you want them gone, removing them one by one is not necessarily an option. It will simply take too long. Luckily, there is a much faster option.
As you can see in this photo, rosemary can become almost entirely covered by flowers if they have optimal growing conditions. I took this photo in Spain where rosemary grows naturally in the spring at the peak of the flowering process, so this is more or less the maximum amount of flowers it can produce.
The easiest way to remove all flowers from a rosemary bush that looks like the one above is by pruning the entire plant.
Cut the plant back by up to a third to remove the majority of the flowers. Once that is done, remove any remaining flowers by cutting them off or picking them one by one. I explain the best way to do this below.
At this point, I want to mention that the advantages of letting your rosemary flower if it is already at this point in the process far outweigh the advantages of stopping it in my opinion. Sure, you might encourage it to start growing slightly faster, but you also risk causing it unnecessary stress and it won’t be long before it stops flowering anyway. I recommend waiting for that and pruning it then.
It is important that you know what you’re doing if you decide to prune your rosemary. If you don’t, you risk damaging the plant or cutting it in a way it won’t recover from. To avoid any problems, check out my guide on how to prune rosemary.
Best Way To Remove Individual Rosemary Flowers
Rosemary can produce a lot of flowers but if the growing conditions aren’t optimal or the plant is just starting to flower, there might not be a lot of them yet.
If you want to stop your rosemary from flowering by removing the flowers and there aren’t too many of them, the easiest way to do it is to simply cut them off or pick them one by one.
The best way to remove rosemary flowers one by one is to cut them off with clean and sharp pruning shears. This ensures a clean cut which reduces the risk of damaging the plant or introducing diseases.
It is important that you cut at the right place though. That’s what I’ve tried to illustrate with this photo. I explain the red and blue lines below.
Cut the flower at the base (the red line) to make sure it doesn’t regrow from the same spot.
If it seems too comprehensive to do this for each flower, you can also cut the stem (around the blue line). That way, you’re sure you removed the flower entirely and you don’t have to be as accurate.
If you don’t have pruning shears, you can pinch the flowers off between two fingers. This usually works perfectly fine, although the risk of damaging the plant is slightly higher since you don’t get the same clean cut as you would with pruning shears. Don’t worry too much about this, though. I do it all the time and once you get the hang of it, the risk is very low.
This approach to removing flowers can take a while depending on how many there are. To speed things up, use a combination of this method and heavier pruning where you cut entire stems back.
Or consider not removing the flowers as I discussed earlier in this article. The insects will love you for it and the rest of your garden will too since the pollinators that are brought in by the rosemary flowers benefit the entire garden. You can also save a lot of time by just letting your rosemary flower. This is what I do.