In article , Regina
wrote:

Cass wrote:
wrote:

Cass wrote:

Regina wrote:

Cut back harder! I know
I need to cut back harder.

I BR'd Pierre de Ronsard and left the canes about 3 feet, and it's
doing fine too. BR'd 2 Westerlands, one cut the canes back to 15
inches, one with canes cut back to 24 inches. All fine.

Fine like strong new basals? (photo?) See, that's what I want, a
little urban renewal.

Sure, I'll take pix a little later in the day.

Cool.

Fine as in didn't die,
now leafing out and growing new basals.

I love new basals, once they've survived the life threats of hard
freeze, wind and dogs.

And I am finding that once that is done, they need less and less time
from me, which then of course fully justifies adding more roses. Here's
a zen question for you - can one aspire to be Mack and not prune?

One can, but some roses like the abuse.

The question is, which ones, and how often? Not yearly, surely?

Not me. I watch. If it grew well once, it can do it again, right? So I
start by removing some older canes. But on a short rose like Sunsprite
(mine was only 3-1/2' tall), that just doesn't produce enough of a
change in a single season. Why not a whack every 3 or 4 years? I also
whacked an Austin this year, not to 1 foot but to 2 feet. Looks good so
far.

For a rose with a shape, like a climber, a pillar, a fountain, it gets
trickier. I've managed well with the remove-the-whole-cane approach
except for Lavender Lassie. Tom Liggett warned that it wouldn't produce
new basals after the first few years. And it seems to be true, but it
*does* produce long continuing laterals from the base, i.e. if you cut
it back to a foot, it will throw a long new lateral right from the
bottom. So that kind of growth is its form of a basal, like Altissimo,
except Altissimo produces both new basals and new
low-laterals-that-might-as-well-be basals.

Now a 6 foot upright HT, all barky? I haven't got a clue. I tried to
prune a few at the SJHRG, and since they all grew differently, I pruned
them all differently. A couple had nice shrubby growth, and I tried to
just shape them. That's always my first inclination. I admit, tho, that
if some of the really barky ones were in my garden, I'd whack them hard
just so I wouldn't have to look at that barky base again!

Truth be told, I prune every rose differently. The only two that I have
that grow alike are The Fairy and Sea Foam. I prune them alike: remove
old dead wood from underneath, wait til they leaf out and then cut off
leftover hips and dead tips. Ex post facto pruning.