Hi, this is Leslie Uppinghouse and I'm here at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

And today I'm talking about cutting back herbaceous perennials.

And the plant I have in front of me is mealy blue sage.

The beautiful thing about a herbaceous perennial is it will very clearly tell you visually in the winter where and when to cut back.

So this nice brown stalk of this plant is clearly this year's growth, this past year's growth, we're still in January, but the bright green at the very base of the plant is this upcoming years growth.

All different types of salvias will bloom pretty much all summer long.

Some the mealy blue sage will bloom for a very long time.

So very late spring all the way through summer through fall.

So you can cut this plant multiple times a year.

And I'll talk a little bit about that.

But for right now, I'm going to show you the process for cutting it back in the winter.

It's pretty easy.

It tells you right and where to cut it.

There is no reason to cut this plant here in the winter because you still have that brown stalk.

So what I'm going to do and I'm going to kind of try to do it from the side so you can see it is I'm just very quickly going to cut all those brown stalks to the ground.

Technically, I'm going to kind of try to hit it above the node.

The node meaning the little junction on the stem where new growth would come from.

So I'm going to hit it right above that.

But because I have a big bunch of these plants, I'm not really looking too hard at it.

If I had a big field of this plant, you could do a first cut with a pair of shears.

If you were very brave and very technically accurate, you could maybe hit it with a weed whacker.

But I don't have too many to go on and it's pretty quick work.

I'm using a sharp pair of pruners that are not terribly big, but this is all just dead growth.

So you're not harming any tissue.

All salvias will produce green growth every time you cut them.

I do want to talk about when this plant is leggy in the summer, a neat trick is let's say it's all bloo ming.

You're midsummer.

You know it's getting kind of leggy, but you want to keep it blooming.

So one of the things I like to do is I'll cut about every other stem to the ground and I'm going to leave the blooms at the top.

So what I'm kind of doing is tricking the eye into thinking that the plant blooms and blooms and blooms and blooms and blooms continuously.

But what I'm doing is I'm actually thinning by removing about every third stalk, I'll get nice new growth that will bloom in a couple of weeks.

And then I cut those old blooms back to the ground.

But for the winter, I'm going to start fresh and I'm going to cut it all back.

So I have that nice green growth that will come up and bloom depending on the season quite early.

So for backyard Basics, this is Leslie Uppinghouse.