Last night we had a windstorm and I woke up this morning to find the
rose trellis over on its side in the garden. The trellis is an arch,
about 7 feet in height.

I never prune the climbing roses on the trellis for two reasons: a)
they say not to prune climbing roses and b) I don't want to get on a
ladder to prune them when they're up so high. But now they are
conveniently lying on the ground, and I figure, if there's any time to
prune them, it's now.

Your rapid response appreciated, since I'll probably deal with this as
soon as I finish drinking my tea and wash up with the breakfast
dishes.

Warm Regards,

Claire
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Claire Petersky wrote:

Last night we had a windstorm and I woke up this morning to find the
rose trellis over on its side in the garden. The trellis is an arch,
about 7 feet in height.

I never prune the climbing roses on the trellis for two reasons: a)
they say not to prune climbing roses and b) I don't want to get on a
ladder to prune them when they're up so high. But now they are
conveniently lying on the ground, and I figure, if there's any time to
prune them, it's now.

Claire, this may be too late, but I hope not. The identify of your
roses *is* important. Bewa some roses only flower on old wood, such
as Cl. Peace and most ramblers. So I would prune such a rose very
sparingly, really just removing hips and giving it a good deadheading.

And some roses are reputed to like no more dead-heading than just
snapping off the spent flower heads. So...the names of your roses do
matter, and one-size-fits-all advice could lead to a year without
blooms. Once-blooming roses are best pruned after the spring flush, not
in the early spring.

Assuming it is a repeat blooming modern rose, don't shorten the
climbing canes (the really long basals), but *depending* of the way
your rose grows, you can "prune" your climber each year by shorteing
the laterals. How short depends on how your rose likes to grow and how
much you need to restrain it. I generally cut back to nice stout wood,
about pencil sized.

If any of the basal/climbing canes is very old and if your rose has
lots of growth, you can remove any old, unproductive canes you may
find.

Good luck. I've used 3/4-inch galvanized conduit pounded into the
ground to secure garden structures. You pound them in and then strap
them to your trellis with U-shaped brackets. You can cut the conduit to
size using a hack saw.

(Claire Petersky) wrote in message . com...
Last night we had a windstorm and I woke up this morning to find the
rose trellis over on its side in the garden.

Bad form to follow up on my own post, but I'll just say -- after I
went out there and looked at the situation more closely this morning,
it became clear that the top of the trellis was completely rotted
through, and had splintered when it fell over. So this was not just a
matter of righting the whole thing and setting it back to the way it
was.

The trellis was constructed such that it was nailed-together sections
that were then bolted together. It was pretty easy to unbolt those
sections. Then I had to carefully unwind each cane out of the trellis
sections and unwind them from each other.

Then, decision: buy a new trellis, or use the still-sturdy sections of
the trellis in a new config, and do something different. I ended up
with the second of these two options. I used three of the four
latticed panels to make a sort of ladder up the side of the house.
Then I put a series of eye-bolts into these 2 x 8 beams that come out
of the house. Then I bound each cane to latticed panels and then used
the eye bolts to bind the canes to the 2 x 8s.

This whole project took three hours. There's a lot more that needs to
be done. There's the other rose (a Fourth-of-July? Some name like
that) that has never has done that well in that spot, and I will move
that a sunnier location tomorrow. And the clean-up has just been done
in a very spotty fashion.

Meanwhile, I didn't need to worry about the pruning, really. While it
was down, I did take out the obviously bad canes and dead wood.
However, enough canes unfortunately snapped off in the fall and then
unwinding, that the pruning is basically done.

Any other comments or suggestions well appreciated -- thanks.

Warm Regards,

Claire