No rose garden can be considered complete unless you’ve introduced at least climbing roses into your collection of rose species. All roses will need pruning at sometime or other, even if it’s to simply remove any dead or diseased wood. Pruning roses isn’t difficult if you have a basic understanding of their growing and blooming habits. Unfortunately climbing roses need a different style of pruning to ramblers, and this can give some people real difficulty as it can be tricky to tell them apart.
One easy way to spot the difference is to examine the foliage: A climbing rose will sport leaves that are separated into seven sections whilst a rambler is divided into five. This distinction can be accounted for by their different ancestry.
Having established that your rose is indeed a climbing rose, it’s also important to realize that pruning is an integral part of training the rose too. The natural habit of a climbing rose is to grow straight up into the air; unfortunately this is neither attractive nor does it encourage the rose to bloom as prolifically as it might otherwise do.
As a rose is not a vine in the true sense, in that it can’t support itself, it consequently needs a framework on which to be supported. The shape of this framework will depend on the shape of the structure that it’s fixed to. A climbing rose, much like an apple tree, will produce many more flowers and hence more fruit, when the branches are encouraged to form either a fan shape or an espalier type structure. Bending the rose canes toward the horizontal reduces the amount of nutrition travelling along them, and the rose, and indeed the apple tree both, are encouraged to put more energy into fruits rather than growth. Realizing that horizontal canes will produce far more blooms than any vertical growth, it makes sense to start training the canes horizontally as soon as possible.
Because it makes sense to train only healthy canes, our first task is to select any dead and diseased canes and prune them out altogether. Having completed that, it’s time to start training the remaining strong growth to fit your framework. In the first two, possibly three, years, depending on the vigor of your particular variety, there should be no need for pruning except to remove any diseased wood that develops. Simply bend the strong canes toward the horizontal and secure them using ties of some description, not too tightly as the cane will need to swell a little as it ages.
At this point, it’s worth noting that three years is the limit for rose canes, other than the main framework. As it ages, the wood on the canes, can get really tough, and as such, it becomes increasingly difficult for new growth to emerge from it. New growth will emerge from the main branches in early spring, and then after flowering. Cut these back to approximately 6in from where they exit the lateral stems. As climbing roses flower best from year old wood, the new growth that emerges here will be where the flowers emerge next year.
In the third year, other than for your main framework, prune out any dead and diseased wood, as usual, and then begin selecting strong canes that exit your framework, with a view to using these to replace the older laterals. Again, tie these new laterals in, arching them gently to encourage them to flower better and once this is done, remove the old growth they’re replacing. These new growths will probably grow to about 8in or so and produce the flowers for the following year.
Remember to prune your climbing rose every summer, bearing in mind that it’s last year's growth that will produce this year's flowers.
I suggest that you buy decent tools for your pruning jobs. A pair of secateurs is useful for pruning most plants in your garden, not only your roses, and a quality pair should last for many years. I personally prefer the bypass type to those that rely on an anvil. Felco produce the best secateurs, they’re expensive, but they’re designed with a professional workload in mind.
Keith Berwick is a rose growing enthusiast who has been growing roses both professionally and for pleasure for over 40 years and enjoys helping others to get started in this rewarding hobby. For more great information on growing climbing roses, visit www.rosecaretoptips.com
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