What to Take/Leave

Before you approach your rosebushes with a pair of shears, reacquaint yourself with terminology you learned in Chapter 4.  As you know, rose wood comes in three sizes.  Basal breaks, or main canes, are the largest and grow from the bud union.  Laterals develop on canes, and stems grow on laterals.

First, take out what you know must come out:  all twiggy growth, unhealthy wood or deadwood, and spindly tall growth that waves in the breeze at eye level, ready to poke you.  Split bark is a sign of wood that probably must be removed.  These openings, which are usually caused by stems rubbing against each other, are breeding grounds and entry spots for diseases.

Learn to judge the vigor of rose wood by examining the pith (inside wood) within bark.  Creamy white or green, with no brown spots, is healthy.  Brown or blackened wood is very old or dead and won't produce blooms.  Fresh wood is much easier to cut than deadwood, and you'll learn to feel the difference with you shears.

Multiple canes coming from a single bud union will vary in color by age.  New canes are often either quite red or a clean, healthy-looking green.  Older wood is darker and more scaly.  Some varieties make pruning easy for you by practically color coding their wood.  Others produce wood of the same color, regardless of age, making pith examinations mandatory.

Don't confuse the age of rosebushes with the age of the canes that form them.  Well-cared-for bushes may last for more than fifty years, and the bud union will become large and gnarled.  New canes are produced each year.  Canes are considered young for their first two years, then middle-aged for one year.  Thereafter, they are old.

I have pruned bushes and removed every cane that wasn't produced that same year.  I didn't set out to be tough--I just followed the bush's color-coded pruning guide.

Some beginners have found it helpful to identify those canes they know they want to keep by clipping clothespins to them.  If you do this, be sure not to damage any bud eyes when attaching clothespins.  Above all, be sure to follow a cane with your eyes all the way up and down its length before you cut into it.  Rose canes can be very deceptive in their crossing patterns, and you don't want to cut off a clothespinned cane.

Once only healthy wood is left, stand back to get an overall picture of the bush in order to decide how much more to take out.  I like to leave at least four canes on any bush, and as many as ten on strong, proven growers and performers.

Experts suggest leaving three to six canes on bushes.  Generally, these are the numbers you want to leave.  But with vigorous, healthy growers, you would have a hard time deciding which six to leave.  In fact, you should allow more to remain if the bush has proven that it can support them.

Pruning is one of those subjects for which there are no hard-and-fast rules, although generalities help.  For instance, one usually leaves nothing on the bush except wood at least as thick as a pencil.  For hybrid teas and grandifloras, this will usually be easy; not so for floribundas.  These low-growing bushes produce stems that are more twiggy than larger bushes, but of wood that will support blooms.

Pruning for exhibition or simply for exhibition quality demands semicruelty.  Stem length and size of bloom are important factors in exhibiting roses.  To get what you need for a blue ribbon, you must prune severely.

If you grow roses for your own enjoyment, never plan to exhibit, and are pleased with something less than exhibition-quality blooms, you can afford to leave much more growth on bushes than those with aspirations for showing.  Stems probably won't be as long, or blossoms as large, but that may very well not matter to you.  Form will be affected very slightly--color and fragrance not at all.

Severity of pruning is dictated by either what you want the next year's growth to be or by where you live.  Light pruning requires a minimum of cutting, with bushes left tall, after only twiggy and obviously wrong wood or deadwood is removed.  The goal is a profusion of short-stemmed blooms on a large bush.  Moderate pruning leaves five to ten, 1I/2- to 4-foot canes per bush, depending upon its vigor and growth habits.  Usually, half the length of each cane is removed.  There will be good garden display, and some exhibition blooms, particularly from new, snapped basal breaks.  Severe pruning leaves only three to four canes, which are sometimes less than 1 foot tall.  In harsh winter climates severity may be necessary anyway for winter protection.  Exhibition freaks may do it for the showy yield.  It can be considered only for the most vigorous bushes; weak ones can't take the shock.

I remember what it was like to see severe pruning tactics for the first time.  The rosarian who helped me conquer that particular fear kept saying, "You have to take to get," as she ruthlessly hacked away.  Still, it takes time to become sufficiently heartless to do a thorough job.  Often, it's necessary to remove sections larger than the bush was when it was planted.  But look at it this way:  a bush has only so much energy.  Rather than diverting some of it to try to rejuvenate old wood that has produced all the good stuff it's likely to, why not remove it and hope that the energy it would have taken will be directed to new development in the form of basal breaks?

Ideal pruning height will vary by variety.  Bushes don't grow the same or to a standard height, nor can they be pruned identically.  Some grow tall, and nothing you do, including pruning them only inches from the ground, is going to make a difference finally.  In fact, if you try to change some their natural habits, they'll get back at you during the growing season by spending all of their time growing to the height at which they are comfortable for blooming.  Until they get there, they may not bloom at all.  Other tall bushes may have to be pruned severely, not because you would even consider changing their growth habits, but because if you don't, you won't be able to reach blooms without a ladder by summer's end.

People hate being told to use common sense, but pruning is a time when you simply must.  If a bush has proven itself a hardy grower and bloomer, leave more than the usual number of canes.  If there is a healthy new cane coming right from the center of the bush and crossing the middle of it, but it's the best you have to work with, leave it.  If you have let a main cane develop above the height where a lateral should appear, cut in to it.  If a floribunda has performed for you on what looks like weak, spindly wood, treat it as if it's thicker than any pencil you've ever seen.  If you have more than one bush of a variety, try pruning them differently to see for yourself what suits you best.

I've pruned bushes and left a cane that I wanted just for the first bloom.  After the first flush, I cut it out just as I would have at pruning time.  Remember that while major surgery is never performed during the growing season, lots can and should be taken out then.  You can always take growth out later, but you can never graft it back.

Sometimes the best canes on a bush will be too close to each other, and you'll wish you could spread them apart.  You can.  Decide, within reason, how far apart you'd like to push them and cut a section that length from a cane you've already removed.  Insert it into thorns on the two canes you're separating.  By midsummer the separation will be permanent and the prop can be removed.  If you can't find it later because of the abundant foliage hiding it, just let it stay.  No harm can be done, and the prop can safely remain until the canes themselves are eventually removed.

Your local consulting rosarian will prove invaluable yet again by letting you know about growth idiosyncracies in your area.  I have visited growing areas where some varieties grow to twice the height of mine; others are lilliputian by comparison.  In those cases it's not a question of superior growing conditions--it's purely locale.

I visited New Zealand recently and saw some wonderful roses.  Some of the best were in the rose garden in Te Awamutu, a town of about 5,000 residents.  So much was wonderful, but I'll always remember the Dainty Bess.  When I first spotted it, I thought it was something else.  It looked like Dainty Bess, but it was taller than any I had ever seen.  Sure enough, it was, and they just grew it that much better than we.  Just when I was starting to doubt our own growing culture, I spotted something that looked like Queen Elizabeth, but a floribunda version of our magnificent grandiflora.  They just can't grow the Queen as well as we can (it's more Princess-like), so I got over the Dainty Bess one-upmanship.  No rhyme or reason can explain this, you understand; we just all take what we get and push it to the limit.