A decade ago, when I was first working out how to grow things on my balcony and trying to understand the difference between an annual and a perennial, rose pruning seemed an impossibility. To me it represented everything about the (slightly scary) horticultural old guard that I just could not relate to. Foam kneelers! Beige anoraks! Chelsea flower show tickets! It all felt a world away from the straggly mint I was trying to keep alive on a concrete ledge.
Fast forward 10 years and I am now the kind of person who fantasises about giving that unloved rose peering over the neighbour’s garden wall a good prune. February may be the time when scarlet stems fill up sad buckets in supermarkets and petrol stations (it would be much better if people gave their Valentines seasonal flowers), but for me it’s time for rose planting – and pruning – in the garden.
A few years ago I spent 14 February planting a bare root rose. I have since moved it a couple of times but it’s now coming along nicely – and it’s high time I got snipping.
If you want to plant a rose, bare roots are the cheapest and most gratifying way to do it. They arrive looking unfathomable: £25 for a stick in a bag – what kind of scam is this! And yet if you dunk it in a bucket of water for a few days – or weeks, as is often the case outside my back door – before planting it in the ground with a good spadeful of compost (and some mycorrhizal fungi if you’re feeling flush), you’ll have flowers within months. It’s a miracle.
The choice can be overwhelming, so it’s best to think about your priorities: smell, shape, colour, spread and tolerance. Most roses demand a lot of sunlight – something my north-facing garden often struggles to offer – which whittled down the options. Then I wanted something that would smell heavenly and climb a wall, rather than grow into a bush, in the perfect shade of pale pink. ‘The Generous Gardener’ – a David Austin rose that has an old-fashioned smell and blousy blooms – fitted the bill.
Now that it’s in its third year, I’ll be pruning it back heavily to encourage stems, and the flowers to come, over the arbour rather than into the air above the garden wall.
When you see new growth appear on your roses, it’s time to prune. There’s a lot of science out there on how to do it, much of it debunked (you could take a chainsaw to your roses if you really wanted), but in essence: cut back anything that is dead, dying, damaged and diseased, as well as anything that’s irritating you because of how it’s growing. Then sit back, have a cuppa, and think of the summer to come.
