On 06/08/2011 01:51, in article , "rose"
wrote:

When I took over my allotment a few years ago, there was a rose tree/bush
that I presume started out as a "proper" rose but has since gone wild. The
trouble is that I've never been sure how to prune it.

When a rose "goes wild", it's because it was originally grafted on to a wild
rose, and for some reason the cultivated rose has died and all you have is
shoots from the wild rose it was grafted on to. It may be nothing more than
failure to remove suckers from the wild rose - they typically have more
vigour than the cultivated one (which is why the cultivated one was grafted)
and therefore take over.

It's approximately 9 foot high, but the first 3 foot at least is just bare
"trunk".

That is curious. Most of the wild roses used for grafting are shrub form and
throw up a lot of shoots from the base.

Roses grow by throwing up strong vegetative shoots. These shoots then put
out shorter flowering shoots in the following year. I would try cutting out
some of your long shoots to about a couple of buds from the trunk. Then I'd
take the remaining shoots and gently curve them round and down and tie them
into position - you may find that the bend will stimulate them to put out
flowering shoots in nature, the rose will try to climb to the top of the
canopy before flowering. While the stem is still going upward, it obviously
hasn't reached the top, so won't flower. When it reaches the top, and
there's nothing more to support it, it will bend under its own weight, and
therefore knows it's time to flower.

Meanwhile, I'd try to start some cuttings. Once I'd got a cutting growing
successfully, that'd give me the courage for really drastic pruning, perhaps
reducing the length of the trunk, knowing that if it died on my, I could
replace it with the one I'd grown from a cutting.