susan thomas wrote:

Visited a friend today in NE Ohio who was unhappy that his roses had
bloomed so sparsely this year. I don't know what variety they are,
sorry. The plants are quite large and have been trained on a trellis
to meet and arch overhead; the plants are at least 8 feet tall and a
few years old. There is much green new growth as well as woody growth
from previous years on large stems; many stems are 1" in diameter. I
thought the plants might be putting too much energy into stem and leaf
growth to produce too many blooms. Any other thoughts?

Unless he has fertilizer burn or salt build-up in the soil from
over-feeding, it isn't really likely your friend has too much green
growth on his roses. That growth is the energy factory for the plant
and its blooms. I hear of people that over-fertilize roses, but usually
the foliage looks poor when that happens. Lots of growth is a good
thing in a rose.

Several other possibilities come to mind. One is that the rose has been
trained too vertically. Climbing roses are a misnomer, in that they
really produce their flowers from canes that trained horizontally, not
vertically.

If they have been properly trained, another possibility is that they
have been improperly and too severely pruned in a way that removed the
flowering wood. If the rose is a climbing hybrid tea, it may not bloom
on new wood, i.e. canes produced this year. If the rose was pruned too
heavily last year, the flowering wood might have been removed. This is
true of roses like Climbing Peace, for example.

Another possibility is that the rose isn't mature enough to bloom well
yet. Some roses take at least 3 years to look even vaguely good,
especially if they plan on getting really big!