Now Is the Time to Prune Your Garden Roses
Roses benefit greatly with a regular, hard prune before the weather warms up and the bushes are dormant. This encourages lots of new growth and plentiful blooms. Follow these tips on pruning your roses.
Roses are one of the few shrubs that thrive with frequent, strategic, if not heavy pruning. While pruning roses may seem intimidating, the basics are simple to understand, beginning with understanding what type of rose plant you have in your garden.
There are many types of rose bushes ranging from climbing, hybrid tea, floribunda, and more, and each has a slightly different method for pruning.
Knowing when your type of rose bush blooms will help direct you on when to prune it correctly. All roses are essentially pruned in the same way – first in spring with a hard prune, and again after they bloom to remove old flowering stems. Since there are some roses that bloom just once a year, they may only need the heavy spring pruning while other types may need tidying up throughout the season after they re-bloom.
Imagine that every new bud will grow into a long cane, and you can visualize what the shrub may look like in mid-season. The shorter the canes on the first spring pruning, the healthier and thicker the new canes will be.
The first hard prune is always in late winter or spring, removing dead canes and reducing healthy stems to help stimulate strong, healthy growth. Every cane should be cut back at least halfway to the ground and reducing the plant to just a few canes will result in stronger stems.
It’s hard to over-prune a rose bush. The basic rose pruning essentials apply to all roses and while there are many techniques and methods, as long as you don’t cut the plant to the ground, you are safe to cut. Nearly all roses are grafted onto a hardier or healthier rootstock (near the soil line) so it is hard to make a serious mistake unless you cut where the rose branches near the ground.
If overwhelmed, begin by removing all old or weak canes in spring just as the rose bush is beginning to sprout. Leave only the thickest, youngest and strongest canes, reducing their length to at least half. Older stems can be identified by being woody, grey, or thin and branchy. These will not produce solid flowering stems All roses bloom on the current season’s new growth sp cut back to the strongest, most robust emerging new stem. This may be near the trunk and rarely at the end of a cane.
Always prune after your plant blooms (deadheading) except if your rose bush forms lovely rose hips that are also a feature of some species and varieties. Cut flower roses like hybrid teas and many modern hybrids considered ‘everblooming’ will require the faded flowers to be removed. Those flowering stems are best reduced by half to stimulate a second and third set of flowers throughout the season.
Some shrub roses and old-world or antique roses are grown not just for their flowers but often for their unique, showy, and edible rose hips. Most roses grown for their rosehip display are pruned only in the spring, requiring just some tidying up with pruning shears during the growing season. This is particularly true with the Rosa rugosa varieties often known as Beach Roses.
Not all roses are grown for their flowers and rose hips. A few garden varieties are cultivated more for their attractive thorns or foliage. Rosa glauca does produce nice pink, single flowers but is often included in gardens for its lovely purple foliage. Thorns are often more attractive than flowers too. Rosa sericea subsp. Omeiensis f. pteracantha (the Chinese Winged Rose) is grown strictly for its long, translucent and scarlet thorns. Savvy gardeners will often prune these shrubs lightly if at all, to retain all their attractive features.
Unlike other shrubs, where once tends to trim and sheer the plant to create a pleasing shape or form much as a barber might work, roses require the opposite approach. Pruning out all branches that are weak or thin, regardless of the shape of the final bush. Obviously form is still important but pruning a rose bush is more like pruning a tree than it is a topiary or a typical flowering shrub. You will need to visualize and imagine every new growth emerging from a bud as a long cane.
Always use sharp cutters. Ideally, secateurs that are clean and sterilized with a 10% bleach solution between cuts as nearly all roses are susceptible to many pathogens spread from plant to plant. Removing and disposing of all cut stems and foliage, especially at the end of the season, is wise (never compost such waste to encourage the spread of diseases). In warmer climates, rose enthusiasts even cut and remove any green foliage that is old at the end of the season to reduce disease transmission.
Roses can be dangerously thorny so invest in leather or suede pruning gloves, an essential tool when cutting long canes. Keep a trash bucket or wheelbarrow nearby in which to drop cut canes. Leaving any on the ground invites injury to children, bare feet or pets. Cut exceptionally thorny branches into smaller bits and send them to the trash bin rather than the compost pile.