Rellie
I am a newbie gardener as well. My parents used to have several bird of paradise and this is from the experience I had then....may want to wait for more people to come through with answers.

Not sure what type of bird you have? The type my parents had were with the orange flowers. I always trimmed out the old dead flower stalks as far down into the bush I could get! I trim up any leaves that look ragged, yellow and that were split really bad. Again I cut down as far as I could go. The remainder that is left will be brown but don't worry about it....in several years they will dry up enough where you can just pull them out and make the plant look cleaner.

There is a white bird of paradise (bop) and the birds are lower in the bush and the leaves are split more than the colored variety. So don't go cutting all the ragged leaves because this is how they are supposed to grow!

Don't know if that helped any!
Catlover

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thanks, they are the orange variety. appreciate the help.

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rellie