One of my favorite TikTok gardeners, GardeningGrant, complained earlier this summer about cockeyed liatris, a normally straight-as-an-arrow perennial. I had heard this complaint in a few other places about other flowers like Sunflowers and cosmos. While I don’t get annoyed at what I call “crazy-stem,” where flower stems are crooked and wild instead of straight, I found myself wondering what caused it.
Stressed out plants go all wobbly
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This type of stem growth can occur for a few reasons. The two most common ones are simple: When a plant is traumatized, it can take it out on the stem. In other words, the stem is like a diary of the life of the plant, in the same way the rings of a tree are. For instance, last summer I was weeding and accidentally uprooted a sunflower. I knew it immediately, and apologized to the plant and stuck it right back into the ground, all within thirty seconds, but the body keeps the score. The sunflower developed a crook right there, and as it grew, it was completely healthy, except for that one crook. Excessive heat, cold, or water stress can have the same effect.
Plants will go to any length to find sun
The other reason stems go all wild-style is to find the sun. If you plant your flowers where they are shaded by another plant or architecture, they’ll bend and twist to try and find the bright rays of sunshine they need to grow. It really doesn’t matter what path that looks like—it’s why you find flowers that crawl on the ground and then take a ninety degree turn up when they find sunshine. My cosmos are always particularly good at this.
Crooked stems don’t necessarily mean poor plant health
It’s reasonable to wonder if these kooky stems affect the plant’s health, and in and of themselves, the answer is probably no. In fact, the plant, having grown against an obstacle, might be stronger for it after. Most gardeners know that as you grow certain plants like tomatoes, peppers, and onions, the starts benefit from not just a fan being on them, imitating wind, so they grow stronger stems, but also from your hands brushing over them, forcing them to become more resilient. So straight stems might just be an aesthetic requirement we have of our plants, but that’s still OK. We grow flowers for aesthetics.
Clumping bulbs can also cause it
This brought me back to the liatris problem of Grant’s, a perennial grown from a bulb. I wondered why a plant in full sunshine, grown from a bulb, without additional stressors would develop crooked stem. The answer, it turns out, is that perennials tend to form clumps of greenery, and the flowers are forced to grow through those clumps, and of course, since the clumps present obstacles, they grow in with twists and turns, instead of straight upward.
How to make plant stems grow straighter
To ameliorate this, you want to be sure that you are dividing your perennials once they are dormant—the season we’re heading into—which will result in less clumping. You also want to be sure to plant those perennials in areas with great sunlight exposure and no other obstacles.
Or, just embrace the wild look.