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Landscaping

Pruning Roses – What You Need to Know to Grow Beautiful Roses

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Pruning roses is crucial if you want to grow beautiful, lush roses. Over the years, roses have been highly hybridized and cross bred in order to produce beautiful blooms. This has effected their growth habits. Today, keeping the bush size and shape appealing requires some human intervention in the form of pruning.

Pruning roses isn’t as complicated or mysterious as people make it out to be. In fact, there are just a few basic rules. If you keep these in mind whenever you pick up your pruning shears, you’ll be rewarded with beautiful rose bushes that your friends and neighbors will envy.

1) When to Prune

Rose pruning should be done in the spring, just as the leaf buds begin to swell. It is very important that the pruning is done before the seasons active growth begins. Young roses should not be pruned at all. They need to reach a strong, mature size (2-3 years) before pruning is necessary.

2) How Much to Prune

To some extent, this depends on how large you want the plant to become. Roses height can get out of control without pruning. Generally, a rose bush will grow 3-4 feet over the growing season, so prune it down enough to allow for this much growth. You don’t want the bush to grow so high that you cannot see or smell the blooms at the top.

3) What to Prune

The first thing to do when you start rose pruning is to remove any dead or decayed, broken or damaged growth. Not only does this keeps your bushes looking good, but it prevents the invasion of pests and disease.

Make your cuts just above a strong leaf bud. Notice the direction that the leaf bud is growing. That is the direction that the cane will grow in, if left intact. When pruning roses, you want to leave leaf buds that are growing in the desired direction.

Tiny, spindly canes will generally not amount to much of anything. Remove these so that the plant’s energy can be directed to the larger, stronger canes. Get rid of most of the old remaining leaves to promote new leaf growth.

4) Rose Pruning to Maintain Shape

It is a good idea to keep the center of the bush free of canes that are growing horizontally. This promotes good air circulation which helps prevent fungal infection. Another reason to avoid having canes crossing each other is that they create a lot of leaves that shade lower branches and discourage blooms on the lower part of the plant. When pruning roses, you want to prevent bushes from growing into large tangled masses with small, inferior blooms.

Climbing roses only need to be pruned to control their overall size or when they are growing in the wrong direction.

Continue to shape your rose bushes as they grow. Changing them from wild and unruly to prim and proper is the art of pruning roses.

5) Prevent Disease

Always use sharp pruning shears when rose pruning. Clean the shears after each use to remove any disease or fungus spores. After pruning, any major cuts can be painted with a sealer in order to aid in healing and to help keep out insects and diseases. Regular Elmer’s glue, diluted a bit, works fine and it is cheap.

Finally, finish pruning roses by cleaning up all the dead stuff you’ve cut away. You don’t want to leave infected canes on the ground to spread disease. You also don’t want to be surprised later when you step on an old thorny cane. Pull the weeds from around the rose bush and finish up by placing new mulch around the base of the rose bush.

Correctly pruning roses and controlling their growth habits makes for a lovelier bush and a healthier plant with larger blooms. Proper rose pruning is easy and it is the key to a happy, healthy rose garden. Enjoy your beautiful roses.

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Garden Plants

Enjoying Window Garden With A Year Round Color

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Like hundreds of other plant lovers, spend many happy days in their flower garden. But, always when the last chrysanthemum had been cut down by killing frost there was the dreary time, between late fall and spring, when all growing things were withered and no flower bloomed.

After one of these ruthless frosts, which snuffed all color from the world and made it sad, Mrs. Preston decided to build a winter window garden in her home.

Since then she has had twelve months of color. A scarlet amaryllis, almost hidden by the foliage of an Easter lily, glows in the window. A novelty in gloxinias, called Lady Slipper, blooms year after year in the same pot with only a short rest period between flowering. Several potted geraniums bloom in their sea son and two of them (Nutmeg and Rose) have fragrant, spicy leaves which add greatly to their desirability and lend an interest even when the plants are no longer in bloom.

A Gloriosa lily, with strange flowers, has climbed 6 feet to the top of the window to crown it with its gold and crimson beauty. There are orchids, some of which bloom during the winter holidays to furnish corsages for friends.

“I used to grow gardenias in my window,” says Mrs. Preston. “Now I have something new. It’s called Fleur d’Amour. It looks like a gardenia, doesn’t it?” she said, pointing to a plant with shining leaves and white gardenia-like flowers. “It has a gardenia-like fragrance, too, that I find captivating.”

The most prized plants in Mrs. Preston’s winter garden, however, are her African violets. It would be difficult for anyone to find a more colorful collection. Some are the usual ones bought at nurseries but quite a number are those Mrs. Preston has raised from seed.

One of her seedlings, grown-up, was mentioned in a magazine that gave the plant special mention for being outstanding in foliage and bicolored blossoms. Many of the other violets were also grown from seed. On the second shelf, near the curtain, is one of several doubles. There are also a number of singles, red, pink and white.

The window garden faces the east and south. It affords abundant light all day. The rack on which the violet plants on the right are seen was constructed so as to give perfect drainage. Underneath the rack is a galvanized iron, water-tight pan filled with cinders. It absorbs any surplus water accidentally spilled in watering. This pan is always moist and so acts as a humidifier to offset the too dry atmosphere frequently found in our modern homes.