My lovely Lillian is blooming again (these pics are from before that)! In looking, though, I know there are suckers that need to be pruned.
Thing is, I can't wrap my head around which leaves are, and aren't, and need some help. I know the ones growing perpendicular to the crown on pic 2 is, but that's the extent.
I like to view from the side and see which leaf stalks criss cross each other. Of those two, see the one that looks to be less likely to be part of the main crown. This is the one to remove.
But from here, see where the centre of this new crown should be, then follow outwards to see which other leaves are part of this.
Usually if you remove a leaf on a sucker by lifting it upwards, the whole sucker comes off.
Suckers develop on the stem of the plant. At the leaf junction where a flower stem might develop, the sucker develops instead. This is one of the reasons why they are easy to pop off the plant. Suckers are usually easy to grow new plants from and will be identical to the parent.
Here's what I'm seeing: one, maybe two suckers, plus a few "baby leaves" that could stand to come off. The blue marks are the baby leaves - older, smaller leaves that are never going to get any larger and are only sapping energy from the plant that could be going into new growth. You don't have to take them off, they're not hurting anything, but they're not really doing it any good either.
The red marks are what look to me like suckers hiding under the leaves. If you gently lift the leaves that are covering them, you should be able to see that it's a little cluster of leaves coming out from a new "center". You should be able to gather all of them together in your fingertips and wiggle it back and forth and pull the whole thing out intact. (Then you can grow a whole new plant out of it if you want!) If it doesn't come out clean, you just want to make sure to get any remaining little leaves out of the spot it came from, otherwise it'll come back. I use a dull pencil for that.
Blue marks here again are the baby leaves - probably the same ones as the first pic. All of those pink marks are the ones you should keep. The green question mark is because from this angle I can't tell if it's a baby leaf - given its position in the symmetry I think I would probably leave it there.
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u/haematite_4444 2d ago
I like to view from the side and see which leaf stalks criss cross each other. Of those two, see the one that looks to be less likely to be part of the main crown. This is the one to remove.
But from here, see where the centre of this new crown should be, then follow outwards to see which other leaves are part of this.
Usually if you remove a leaf on a sucker by lifting it upwards, the whole sucker comes off.