PRUNING Made easy
Climbers and ramblers can become tangled or leggy. Michael Marriott explains how to keep them looking neat
WHEN PRUNED properly, climbing and rambling roses are an exuberant delight. Pruning them helps create a strong, healthy, attractively shaped plant that’s smothered in flowers from the ground upwards, ideally where you can smell some of them! Climbers and ramblers differ in their vigour and growth habits. Generally speaking, ramblers are much more vigorous and floriferous, but most don’t repeat flower after their first June flush. Climbers tend to have fewer, larger flowers and stiffer stems, and most modern cultivars repeat flower. Ramblers are generally too big for a garden obelisk or archway, but they’re ideal for covering a pergola, scrambling up a tree or hiding a garage. Despite these differences, if you want to constrain the size of your rose, pruning them is essentially the same. Start by deciding what you want your plant to do. Does it need to cover a wall or scale a pergola, archway or obelisk? Keep any new stems that help you meet those aesthetic goals. When training them against a wall or fence, fan out the growth and, using soft ties, secure the young stems to horizontal galvanised support wires to create your initial framework. If the shoots are long enough, they’ll produce sideshoots that will flower. If training a climber up an arch, obelisk or pergola, tie the stems in vertically.
● Climbing roses: Thin out congested growth by removing dead and diseased stems first, then weak ones and those in the wrong place. The books say to remove crossing stems, but it’s only rubbing stems that do damage. To make space for new extension growth (young, green) you may need to remove older stems (woody, brown) at the base with loppers or a pruning saw. Reduce shoots that flowered last year by two thirds.
● Rambling roses: These can quickly become a tangled mess if left to their own devices, so annual pruning is vital – unless it’s climbing up a tree, in which case you can leave it alone. These roses produce lots of long, flexible growth and flower on the previous year’s stems. For a full, wild and romantic look, leave the long summer growth then prune after flowering. For a neater look at flowering time, prune in winter instead. ✿