How to prune a tangle of rose stems for petal perfection
Q We’ve moved into a garden with lots of roses. They flowered well but are now a tangle of stems, and while pruning is the obvious answer we have no idea when or where to start and are scared of cutting the wrong bits. Please can you specify good basic technique? Adele Nielson, Stratford-upon-Avon, West Midlands A You can’t replace maturity in a hurry, and I would view these roses as an asset. The first step is to work out roughly what sort of rose they all are, prune them as soon as they start into growth (usually in February, but avoid freezing weather) and design around them.
The top of our previous garden was dominated by a massive climbing rose sprawled in a heap. Instead of hacking it back, we built a pergola over a winding pathway – with added roses, clematis and honeysuckle, this worked a treat.
Of the four major groups of roses, bush types (hybrid teas and floribundas) are fairly stiff and upright. Shrub roses are generally taller with longer, thinner stems. Compared to ramblers, climbing roses tend to have fewer, more substantial stems rising from the base. Ramblers send up many long flexible wands of growth and usually flower magnificently just once a year, in summer.
View pruning as an art form, enjoy it, and get the feel of the plant first while removing dead stems. Be as tough as you like with bush roses, deciding on a height and cutting stems down to it. With shrub roses, be more lenient and shorten stems by a half to one third. Where several stems come up from near the base, prune an older one lower to encourage replacements.
Climbers need a framework from which to flower, so visualise this, remove older, unwanted stems and tie in the rest before shortening the side shoots. With ramblers, cut any older stems to the base (normally after flowering), leaving the newer wand-like growths that will bloom this summer. Don’t shorten these, but tie in or guide them to a tree.