Rose Pruning By Woody

The Rambling Rector Rose creates a stunning natural canopy for a garden seat.

Roses fall into very defined categories - bush, shrub, climbing, rambling - and within these sub categories like Hybrid Tea and Floribunda (bush roses). With this comes different rules and advice about how to prune and when.

But what happens when you don't know what rose you're dealing with? The beautiful rambling rose pictured above, in flower now, takes pride of place, for these few weeks at least, in the Sitting Spiritually garden where it will flower once before reluctantly loosing its flowers and putting on another spurt of growth throughout the rest of the growing season.

I've treated this rose very much like a climbing rose, and it has responded magnificently. Ideally, you should prune after flowering in Summer (if you don't want the hips). This gives the rose a greater chance of putting on new growth that will flower next season. As is often the case in life, you can't always do things when you want, especially at this busy time of year in the garden. Instead, I gave this rose some major restoration work last December, removing a number of older stems (that had grown out of the other side of the hedge). I also removed dead, dying and diseased ones, as-well-as all side shoots that were less than a pencils width. This opened the plant out, revealing the framework. I then tied in as a series of arches bearing more arches. The idea behind this is to create as much horizontal growth that will encourage vertical flowering growth. Of course, some feeding with our own garden compost as-well-as Marshall's Organic Extra helps.

So after metres of string, many thorns, a little blood but no tears I think the work has really paid off this time. My advice would be not to be too afraid when pruning roses, even if you don't know what it is. Be creative, try something new and don't fear! Remember, you're basically just dealing with an overgrown bramble! But, do dispose of any cuttings in green waste or onto the bonfire to prevent spreading unwanted disease.

Woody is the resident gardener at Sitting Spiritually along with his wife, Anna.

With Many Thanks to Woody for the Blog.

To visit the Sitting Spiritually Garden please call us to make an a time to visit. Viewings are strictly by appointment only.

If you would like to contribute a guest blog, please contact Siobhan at siobhan@sittingspiritually.co.uk