Garden On, Vashon

My "Mrs. Moon" rose

Can’t argue anymore: when croci and daffs are up, cherry trees bloom, cover crop grows, and a squeezed dirt clod breaks up when thumbed, it may be winter by the calendar but it’s spring in ground and air.

The yellow bloom of forsythia is the traditional signal that’s it’s time to prune your roses. (As if their canes breaking out in leaves weren’t signal enough.) Grab a bucket and your felco hand loppers: the bypass kind will make kinder cuts than the anvil style, where one blade smashes against a flat-edged blade. 

Then go appraise your first target bush. Mine—which we’ll call ‘Mrs. Moon’ as once labeled though none of my rose books nor the Internet can find a rose by that name—grows in habit like a floribuna tea or an English/David Austen rose. That is, it’s shrubby, taller than wide, with 3-6′ canes growing from a graft just above ground level. And as you can see from the photo above, it throws plenty of flowers per branch.

Over the summer, it threw several 6′ canes, which you can see in the “Before Pruning” image. The December freeze also left its legacy of dead wood, usually those stumps above prior year’s pruning cuts or new spurs too skinny to keep from freezing through. In fact, as I went through my roses I saw a lot of winter-kill even of the thickest, oldest branches.

All that winter-killed, dead wood has got to be pruned away. Take it down to the base of the brown, even if you have to cut right above the graft, near ground level (you might need mightier loppers for this. Try to make a cut at an angle so that rain will drain off the cut. Also cut out any crossing branches.

After that’s done, start pruning back the new, thin wood at the top of the green branches. You want to prune back to pencil-thick green limbs, down 1/3-1/2 the length of the total branch (see red lines in the “Before Pruning” photo).

Sadly, at least on this bush, that means snipping away a lot of branches that are sprouting leaves. But I am consoled, because I can “read” from prior year’s cuts that from those cuts the bush will grow new and thicker stems instead of these spindlies. All the better to support those heavy sprays of flowers to come.

Where to cut? Look carefully on the pencil-thick stem for a dark ring, not much thicker than a pen line, that goes around the whole stem. You’ll find them every 4-6″ or so. A good one will have a tiny bud knob on it. Make an angled cut 1/4″ above the ring, with the top of your cut arcing above the bud. The plant’s energy rising up that stem will push the new growth right out that bud.

Once the spindlies and deadwood are off, then you can get artistic. Now, it’s about shaping, about aiming the new growth to reach into the open spaces between limbs. For that, you find buds pointing toward those open spaces, and cut there.

When you’re done, your rose bush will look quite ungainly, all knees and knobs and knitting needles bristling with thorns as in the “After Pruning” photo above.

Dump your bucket of prunings into your brush-pile (not into compost) or burn them. Then feed your rose with aged compost, manure, or rose food, well scratched into the earth. Roses, like prima donnas of the ol’ Italian opera, are heavy feeders. Carol Arnold once told me that a scoop of epson salts helps them take up nitrogen. And David Austen, the famous breeder of those English roses, says they also love a fertilizer heavy in potash.

As for climbing roses, the only pruning you need do is prune out old dead canes and any deadwood you can reach. Feed them now, too. Rugosa roses just need to be shaped and their wizened rose hips cut off.

You can prune and shape other summer-blooming shrubs and perennials now, too, such as lavender, santolina, asters, daisies, and potentilla.

By April your roses will have leafed out and, by June, will be blooming like mad. And I’ll be sniffing them and decorating them with snippets of my True Love’s Hair to keep Bambi from loving them to death. Everything needs pruning sometime…