How to prune the Desert Flower plant?

The Flower of the Desert, known to botanists as Adenium obesum, is a caudiciform plant that produces large and beautiful trumpet-shaped flowers during spring and especially in summer. It is not very easy to care for, since it is very sensitive to frost and excess humidity, so it is highly recommended to plant it in pomx, river sand or similar to reduce the risk of rotting.

But of all the doubts that may arise when we get a copy there is one that is surely the most important: How to prune the Desert Flower plant? Well then, let's know how to do it correctly.

When and how to prune a healthy Desert Flower?

The Flower of the Desert, or Desert roseIs a succulent native to tropical Africa. This means that, in addition to not being resistant to cold, much less frost, its growing season lasts almost the whole year. Only during the driest and hottest weeks does it have such a hard time that, to survive, it drops its leaves.

When it happens to live in regions with less extreme climate (at least, as far as heat is concerned) it grows during all the months whose minimum temperature is 15ºC. Therefore, if we want to prune it we have to do it just before its leaves sprout if you have lost them during autumn-winter, or when temperatures begin to rise above 20ºC if we live in an area with a tropical climate.

How is it pruned? The vast majority of times the only thing that is done is to remove the stem from the center so that the plant produces new ones. Being a succulent plant, that is, with fleshy stems and trunk that store a large amount of water, it should not be pruned more than once in its life.

Can you prune a diseased plant?

If our Adenium obesum It is suffering from excess water, and its trunk and stems begin to soften, we tend to take the scissors and prune the most affected parts. But this is a mistakeSince by cutting what we are really doing is forcing the plant to expend energy that it does not currently have to heal the wound. And of course, as the fungi take longer to heal, they proliferate, so in the end the remedy is worse than the disease.

When our plant shows the symptoms mentioned above, we can try to save it by doing the following:

1. The first thing we have to do is extract it from the pot.
2. Then, we sprinkle the root ball (earth bread) with sulfur or copper to eliminate the fungi.
3. Next, we wrap it with kitchen paper (if it is double-layered, better) for a few days, until the soil has completely dried.
4. Then, we plant it in a pot with a very porous substrate (pomx, river sand, or similar) and put it in semi-shade.
5. Finally, we water after a week.

It is very difficult to recover a sick Desert Rose, but not impossible 😉.

I hope it has been useful to you.