"JennyC" wrote in message
...

"Dave" wrote
As I mentioned a while ago my wife who died in April was the
gardener
of the house,And me ,well I used to think the garden looked after
itself. Anyway Ive managed to keep the gardens really nice
throughout
the summer ,but I still have little or no knowledge. Anyway the
roses
are now looking very untidy and Im wondering if i need to prune
them
before or after the winter,and if so has any one got any
instructions
on doing this. Ive got three climbing roses and the rest are just
normal ones apart from the two I bought in the summer one of which
was called sweet Valentine I think. Anyway please excuse my lack of
knowledge on gardening Dave. Oh one last question,now the winters on
its way Ive replaced the summer plants at her grave with winter
pansies,are there any other plants that will flower over the winter
that I can put in pots?.


I personally prune them in late autumn just to tidy them up a bit for
the winter. I remove dead wood and cut back the stems to about half of
what they were. Then I prune them back even more in spring when they
are just about to start growing again. This has the advantage of
looking neat over the winter and any frost damage that might occur can
be removed in spring.

In our part of the world an even bigger advantage of preliminary pruning in
the autumn is that it minimises wind rocking in the winter.

[snip]
Franz