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Rose Pruning
Winter or late fall rose pruning
There are various times during the year when it is necessary to prune deeply planted hybrid teas, floribundas and grandifloras depending on the growing system you are using. Winter or fall rose pruning in the Northern or deep-planting system happens after the plant has gone dormant and shed its leaves. Cut the aboveground canes back to the soil line Cutting them in the fall removes host material for overwintering disease organisms. And it takes care of a rose pruning chore that you would otherwise face in the spring, because the aboveground canes would not survive the winter. As part of the rose pruning job, rake up any leaves from around each bush. Leaves, too, provide overwintering sites for disease and insect pests. A late-season pruning and neatening is consistent with the gardening adage that you should leave the garden in the fall as you would like to find it in the spring.
Cutting canes back to the ground might seem alarming or aesthetically offensive to traditional rosarians, who welcome the appearance of green canes early in the spring. In traditional rose culture, canes are trimmed in the fall to a length of 12-18 inches. Soil is mounded up around them and removed early in the spring, allowing the buds to emerge on the surviving canes. Hilling, however, is a lot of work and of limited success in our Zone 4 gardens. If you do hill your roses, be sure to import the soil from another part of the garden rather than from around your plants, which might insulate the tops but leave the roots exposed and vulnerable to the cold. Summer pruning on the northern system is not greatly different from the traditional approach. The objective is twofold: to take off fading or dying flowers, and to encourage new, properly oriented growth. Removing spent flowers, or deadheading, improves the appearance of the plant, discourages disease and encourages more blossoms. Faded blooms are unsightly, littering the plant and the ground with decaying petals. The spent flowers are also hosts to fungal diseases and food for pests such as earwigs. Cutting each bloom when it begins to fade is a good housekeeping policy. How far back do you cut each blossom and where do you make the cut? In northern gardens, roses produce more blooms if each spent blossom is pruned with a long stem. Removing 12 to 14 inches of stem encourages more shoots from the base of the plant and encourages more buds to grow into flowering branches. More shoots equal more flowers later in the season, when the plant blooms a second and third time. Make each pruning cut about 1/4 inch above an outside-facing bud. This bud will produce a new shoot that will grow away from the center of the plant and so keep the interior open, allowing better airflow and discouraging disease. Summer pruning becomes an art of finding and pruning back to these outside buds. If you must decide whether to remove a long piece of stem or to prune to an outside-facing bud - choose the outside bud, even if this means taking off only 4 or 5 inches of stem. Slightly slant all pruning cuts across the cane. Plants are very resilient, so don't feel intimidated by the possibility of making an inappropriate rose pruning cut. It may help to think that in the traditional rose-growing approach, northern gardeners generally only had one season to prune, or misprune, each rose before it died. Deep planting gives northern gardeners many years to experiment with rose pruning on the same plant.:-) Click here for free newsletter or to ask a question about rose pruning
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