Pruning Hard, or Hardly Pruning?

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With Spring’s arrival comes the annual spring pruning ritual.

I don’t know a rosarian who doesn’t look forward to getting outside and cleaning up the garden for the upcoming summer. We usually say to wait pruning in your neighborhood until the forsythia is in bloom, but with the arrival of some nice weather I left the rules behind and jumped in. I have many roses to cut back at home and I have also been busy at Woodland Gardens in Manchester, Connecticut, pruning out the roses in the rose house.

Cutting Back Roses

I finished the Neighborhood Garden first as that was the hardest hit by crushing street snow last winter. Under all that, though, the canes that didn’t break under the weight were nice and green! Snow can be our friend in the garden if it comes early and stays deep. That garden has hybrid teas, grandifloras, floribundas, minis, and minifloras. Lots of leaves had blown in before the snow arrived, so in addition to cutting the roses back and applying Elmer’s Glue to the freshly cut canes (to keep borers out), I raked out all the leaves that had collected around the rose canes and put them in a brown paper lawn waste bag.

When satisfied there, I went to the Sunrise Garden behind the house on the east side. My friend, Margaret, came last Fall on a ‘learn to Fall prune’ mission and we cut back part of that garden together. I fine-pruned those that we had done together (to an outward-facing stem bud) and then finished off the rest of the roses, some of which were ten feet tall! Again, I raked out any leftover leaves and fluffed up the cedar mulch I had laid down last year.

Pruning Old Garden Roses

To get a change of scenery, on Saturday I headed back out to the front yard. In front of my kitchen window, I have what I call my ‘Austin Puddle Garden.’ In this bed reside eight David Austin roses. David Austin created these roses out of his love of antique roses and used the old garden roses in his hybridizing program.

Old garden roses come in many shapes and sizes, and they are very fragrant. They can get very large and many of them bloom only once, in June here in Connecticut. They have a charming old-fashioned form very different from most of today’s modern roses. Austin’s mission was to create roses that looked and smelled like the old roses but would bloom all summer long in modern colors. His creations are just lovely with multi-petalled, usually nodding heads that give cottage garden appeal to our gardens and rose fragrance to our summer breezes.

I let my Austin roses go for a few years without cutting way back, as they can attain quite the size. Most of them are really robust! But I knew I would have to prune them hard this spring.

Summer

By August, if I wanted to see some of their blooms, I had to come to the second floor to my office to check them out. Forget about breathing in the fragrance…it was way over my head. This Spring, it was time for regenerative pruning so the plants would put up new basal breaks. In a few weeks, we’ll all be able to see the roses and savor the scents.

Some of these amazons were at least 12 feet high when I started! They grew so big that some of the canes were 1.5-2″ in diameter. I spent some time looking at each rose bush before I started cutting. Some of them needed the pruning saw to take out old, gnarly canes. I used the long-handled loppers a lot! By the time I was finished, some of the plants were about 18″ high. These babies have very mature root systems, so they had already started to grow. Again, I sealed up the canes with Elmer’s…and my husband is thrilled that ‘Mary Rose’ will not be able to bite him for a couple of years while he’s mowing the lawn!

Many folks feel that pruning is daunting, but don’t worry! You can’t hurt the rose, and the old grey, non-productive canes aren’t doing you or your roses any favors. You’ll be rejuvenating your older roses and you’ll be rewarded with lots of new, healthy blooming canes for the upcoming first flush!! It’s not hard to prune, and pruning hard will give you great results. Happy Spring!

Meet Marci Martin

Marci Martin has loved roses for as long as she can remember. From the time she was a little girl, she was fascinated with how…

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