Bonjour les tous. My OH gets v. upset when I dead head. No. Incandescent is the word. Especially poppies. He wants flowers to go to seed. I want more flowers. What do you do? I try being sneaky so he’s not upset but he always susses me. My dilemma is his thumbs are far greener than mine.
Surely it depends on the plant/flower. Dead-heading repeat flowering roses makes sense because otherwise they put their energy into producing hips and stop flowering. I’m not aware poppies repeat flower (you and others may know better).
Re poppies, I’m with your OH. Left to go to seed they produce millions of seeds that you can scatter round the garden and in future years they multiply and pop up all over the place.
So the strategy really is more poppy flowers (maybe) versus more poppy plants. 
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I like this answer. Very Much.
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Spot on Sue!
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I deadhead Valerian regularly and this rewards me by flowering again and again and again (marvellous for the bees and hummingbird moths.)… almost non-stop until the frosts make it slumber a little. enough seeds escape to make this plant appear in every nook and cranny…
My Pieris also benefits from being dead-headed which allows it to bloom twice a year. (I think it did bloom 3 times one year, but that was exceptional)
The Fuschias seem to benefit from deadheading… as this prolongs the flowering period.
At the moment I’m jealously guarding a Bee Orchid which has set-seed and I’m waiting for the pods to ripen… then “off with his head”… 
I’m letting a garlicky herb/weed set seed… as it’s delicious
I tend to leave the flowers be letting them go to seed just removing some of the more unsightly ones, the idea being new free plants with colour and shape variations
Fair enough, but which plants are you talking about… ???
Mostly annuals some perennials such as Cyclamens Cannas Dahlias Delphiniums Primulas and Aquilegias
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Sounds a lovely collection.
My plants are mostly flowering shrubs, in tubs… as we’re on rock…
It’s only the valerian which manages to survive in the nooks and crannies… and that stuff really does run riot.
I have nigella all over the place. 15 years ago there was one small cluster of blue flowers in the gravel at the back of the house by the wood store. When they ran to seed I just took the seed heads and shook them out over the various borders. At this time of the year it’s been glorious having their blue flowers everywhere alongside the field poppies (also self-seeding).
That’s the kind of gardening I like. FREE plants! 
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Like some of you, it depends on the flower/shrub as to whether we deadhead or not. Roses, fuchsia, geranium, and the majority of annuals are the ones we usually deadhead to get the benefit of repeat flowering during the summer. Then at the end of the season we always cut back the fuchsia and geranium, and over-winter them in the wood shed. But we leave the poppies to go to seed and it’s surprising just where the flowers pop up the next season – sometimes it’s a fair distance from the original plants. The surprise we got last year was with our hellebore. We let it go to seed, it produced literally hundreds of seedlings and when they were the right size to transplant, we gave them to friends and neighbours. For ourselves, we planted a good number of them in our newly made stumpery and they’re growing nicely. So hundreds of plants for no outlay – that’s my kind of gardening. The photo is of poppies we had in a wild flower collection and shows all three stages of development – bud, open flower and seed.
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