Pruning Your Rose Bush, Part 2

Some people have a tendency to like flowers, but can’t really grow them. Or, they don’t like to spend a lot of time or precision, and they’re looking for something that will grow big, not require a lot of work, and will look spectacular. For this, there is no rose better than the carpet rose.

Carpet roses, while not officially recognized as a separate class, grow slightly different than a Modern, like the hybrid teas, or an Old Garden, or even a Wild, but share traits of all three. They were developed by Werner Noack, who was passionate about roses, but felt that with all the diseases that plagued them they wouldn’t appeal to most gardeners. So, after years of breeding to create this disease resistant rose, he finally introduced the world to the Flower Carpet Rose, the first color being Flower Carpet Pink, which we have in our rock garden.

Here’s the thing, I don’t mind creating a nice looking garden, but sometimes maintaining it during the heat of summer can be a little much. A majority of the plants in the rock garden fit the bill as being extremely low maintenance, and two carpet roses in this 6x25 foot space on a gently sloping hill are part of that collage. Of course, I did what most gardeners should avoid, which is buy a brand new variety. Not that this is a bad thing when it comes to annuals, but for a perennial shrub like roses, this is untested ground and will last much longer. And, of course, my naiveté that it would perform like the carpet roses at my partner’s mother’s house, where the summers are hot and dry and they get watered twice a day. However, I decided to get both the pink and yellow, the latter being the newest, and planted them in the rock garden, where it quickly became apparent the yellow was going to cause some problems.

Carpet roses spread, like a carpet, hence the name. The pink did this beautifully, rising a couple feet off the ground in the middle while the outer canes bent nearly straight out along the bottom, unfolding not unlike a rose bud itself. The yellow, on the other hand, did not. It went straight up, just like a tea or old garden would. I contemplated moving it to the hybrid tea section of the yard between the vegetable garden and the rock wall, but decided maybe it just needed some selective pruning. And so, after a few years of cutting the central stalk that was causing me so much misery, I decided it just wasn’t worth it. I’ll just have an upright rose in the rock garden and leave it at that. And then last year I did something completely uncharacteristic of me… I didn’t prune the roses, none of them. The pink grew so huge, it was trampling on neighbor plants space and at one point was over nine feet across, which, if you’ve never seen a carpet rose, they are completely covered in flowers the entire growing season, which for our climate is from May through December. And guess what the yellow decided to do? Yep, it carpeted… albeit with a center that went straight up. Now, I could have just cut those center canes out, but there was nothing directly behind it that was going to be impacted by leaving it, so I left them on. Of course, our lavender I planted next to it also doubled in size last year, so I may have to train the stems in the opposite direction for this season. We’ll see.

Okay, so now that you’ve been inundated with a massive amount of useless information about our roses, it’s time to focus on pruning them. A carpet rose is probably the easiest rose to prune, since it doesn’t seem to care whether you trim a little off the top or take it all the way down to the ground. Garden shears, like you would use for upright garden roses, would work, but so will clippers that you’d use on any other bush. This last option is probably the best and fastest for early spring pruning, as well as the electric variety. Of course, if you want to keep your carpet rose growing ever larger, just cut off any dead growths and rose hips that haven’t been eaten by the birds or you. What? People eat rose hips, those funny looking fruits that form on roses at the end of the growing season? Yes, people do… just not me… yet. I think this year I will try some, either as a tea or to make rose oil and/or water for cooking.

Crap. I’ve gone off topic again. At least this time it somewhat coincides with the subject. Okay, so to summarize, carpet roses are easy maintenance. They are also the most disease resistant roses on the market. This isn’t to say that you won’t get any blackspot, which is ever so common here in the Northwest, just that carpet roses can handle the harsh cutting required to contain this disease, and will bounce back faster than you can show someone where the affected area was.

Old Garden Roses, which are woodier shrubs that only bloom on second-year canes or older, only bloom once during the growing season, and as such, require a good eye when it comes to pruning, as a harsh prune you would do on your Modern or Carpet rose would leave you with a nice green bush with no flowers. Why, then, would anyone want to grow Old Garden Roses? Because, quite simply, they have been around for a very long time, and because of that, have become quite disease-resistant, and their fragrance cannot be beat. The China rose is the only Old Garden variety that is everblooming, the trait found in most hybrids we see today as they’ve been bred with this rose, but that seems to make it less fragrant, also a trait seen in most hybrids, although our Double Delight could probably give those Old Gardens a run for their money. Pruning an Old Garden requires somewhat minimal effort. Treat an Old Garden Rose like you would a lilac: Don’t prune the first year canes; do prune any old spindly ones; and of course, prune any diseased ones as well.

Climbing roses require a little different approach, as you don’t want to over prune and have to retrain it over the trellis or up a wall again. What you will first want to do is take a look at it from a distance and take note as to where it may be going out of bounds, and where any of the canes look funny, whether they are crossed or growing in the wrong direction. The pruning of a climber is kind of like that of a Modern, in which you prune off much of the thin stems, and leave the thick canes. The main difference is that you want those thick canes to be tied down or trained through whatever they are climbing, without overwhelming it. A good rule is to look at your hand with the fingers spread out… your climbing rose should somewhat resemble this if it is on a wall or wide trellis. Pole climbers should form a spiral, while narrow trellis climbers can go against the rules and be zig-zagged to form a tighter, more compact form, both with a minimum of canes.

All of this information from both today’s and yesterday’s posts are for late-winter and early-spring pruning done at the beginning of the growing season. I will be blogging about how to deadhead and prune all of these roses during and after the growing season when it is time to do so, so please don’t fret!