I’ve been waxing lyrical about the wonderful weather these last few months, but that halcyon time is over and winter has arrived with a first lovely light frost followed by days of horrible every direction winds and cold, thundery showers. That’s much more normal! We are marching towards the shortest day which always seems a starting point to me, but of course actually heralds the meteorological start to winter, not the turning point to spring! Nevertheless, dark mornings and evenings are the truly depressing part of the down months for many, me included, so in a couple more weeks the tide will turn on the increasingly short days and the chooks will start to lay again! I’m being tided over on the egg front by friends and family who keep red shavers. They’ve had their biological clocks bred out of them and don’t seem to notice how short the daylight hours are!
Enough of this domestic dribble, and on to roses and winter.
Most roses like to take a bit of a Winter rest, probably dream of a holiday in Fiji or something, and whilst they are “away” is a good time to give them a good trim and spray for dormant diseases. Pruning is a subject that is way too over thought. Roses mostly like a good trim, whether it be by passing horses or sheep or by your hand, trimming invigorates new growth. In colder areas where tender new leaves can be dissed by frost, pruning needs to be left till later in the winter, as the trimming will indeed encourage new leaves and growth. I have gardened all my life in the North, so don’t know about these things. Whilst we get some good white frosts here most winters, the temperatures aren’t cold enough to make a rose blink, so pruning/trimming can really be carried out whenever the mood takes.
There are certain classes of roses which buck the trend, so to speak, and prefer not to be pruned. These are mostly the Chinas and Teas, which tend to flower right on through the winter months. Pruning them won’t kill them, let alone a light trim, but they can get sulky after hard pruning and are happier left to their own devices. As trimming roses is my business, my Chinas and Teas must put up with removal of cutting wood regularly, but I make sure to always thank them for the offerings and give them some extra fertiliser to sweeten the deal…
Then there are the classes which much prefer a good hack back in winter. Hybrid Perpetuals, Hybrid Teas and Floribundas come under this category. The traditional razing to a foot or 2 high that one sees in public gardens applies here, although not compulsory by any means. The hard prune approach brings on a slightly earlier flush in Spring and produces larger blooms at the outset. One can see if the roots have to get leaves growing all the way up many long shoots before it can start producing flowers, it will take them a bit longer to do it, so rule of thumb is hard pruning produces less but bigger flowers in Spring, whilst light trimming means a lot more slightly smaller flowers. As Spring flowers tend to be very big anyway, I know which method I prefer…
Other classes of roses are happy either way. Shrubs should be pruned to look like shrubs, some callous removal of older wood and trimming to shape. Shrubs that produce arching growth need to be treated carefully, as trimming branches will result in unsightly new growth from the cut, so whole branches that don’t look good should be cut off at ground level. The same applies to most ramblers, which are really gigantic arching shrubs. Unwanted arms (of which there are usually many) should be cut off at ground level and nice new ones trained along the fence or whatever.
Climbers tend to have less shoots from the ground, so pruning should be only old unhealthy arms and just a trim off the laterals.
So, having said it doesn’t matter what you do, I seem to have written a whole heap of rules, just like everybody else!!! Just don’t lose sight of the golden rule, which is roses are really tough and will cope with whatever you do or don’t do to them.
Even if your roses are mostly healthy, it pays to give them a spray sometime in the winter. I like to leave it till maybe July or August, to make sure the bushes and ground around them gets a douse with something anti fungal. The addition of some oil:- conqueror, neem, eco or whatever will keep the scale at bay. This is the one time of year I make sure everything in the garden, including once flowerers, gets a douse. I have to admit I don’t even consider going around the property doing the ramblers and giant climbers, they are too many and big to attempt clean up on! They can take their chances, which are very high…