How to tell if a dying plant will come back next year
Many declining plants are just going dormant or suffering from seasonal stress rather than dying completely. Checking the stems and root systems reveals whether the plant is still alive underneath, saving you from throwing away something that will bounce back in the spring.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Yanking the mushy bits and checking the roots
- 2Cutting them back to clean up the bed
- 3Giving them a hard prune (Chelsea chop) in mid-May
- 4Moving them to a location with full sun and dry soil
- 5Moving the plant inside and outside
- 6Adjusting watering frequency
- 7Changing the amount of direct sun
- 8Tossing it and starting fresh with a new plant
- 9Transferring it to water with rooting hormone
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
r/Landscaping2 people · September 2026
“Any chance these come back next year?”source ↗
dinkNflicka21 · r/Landscaping · 3 upvotes
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 2How to prune unfamiliar plants without killing them
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