Mike ...
Thank you for sharing your experience.
You and Margie garden in similar climates. You may have insects in your gardens that I don't have in mine. In other words, I think this may be a case of one size does not fit all ...
In my climate, the summers are hot and dry. There is no rain.
Let me preface my response by saying, I have never lost a rose to cane borer damage. A couple of roses have lost whole canes, but that's it. Two were own root plants and one was a budded HT that was about 40 years old. The cane borer damage went all the way to the base of the cane, but only one cane was affected in each plant.
From a botanical or even mechanical perspective, I wonder why dried glue on the pruned end of a cane would result in blind shoots below the pruning point. Any hypotheses?
The honest answer is, "I don't know". I can only share what has happened in my garden. I've read the same research articles that Margie referred to in her post, but none of them even mentioned the possibility that the cane would become non-functional if glue were applied at the time of the spring pruning.
Every cane I glued, with wood glue, put out blind growth ... just a little bit all along the wood I left behind when I pruned. It looked very much like the blind growth I get on the roses during our annual January thaw. Conditions are right for the roses to leaf out, but winter is not over, so the roses stall and wait for true spring, when I do my normal pruning.
The growth on the glued canes looked exactly like the January thaw growth.
Thank God the roses were healthy. The roses abandoned the glued canes and put out lots of new basals. None of the roses died, but it took them two seasons to put up good wood. Within one season, the glued canes were dead wood.
There was something about not allowing the sap to form a normal seal that signaled the rose that this cane would be non-productive and should be abandoned. I don't know what that "something" may be. I do know that roses abandon growth that does not serve the plant.
It's easy to say that the problem was caused by my deciding to be proactive against cane borers that year by gluing my pruning cuts, but there are always other variables that come into play when a rose starts to produced a lot of blind growth.
We had gone through 4 years of drought. The water table was lower than it ever had been in this garden. The roses were certainly stressed. We had a very wet winter that year. The variables just keep adding up.
So, for MY garden in the mountains of northern California, gluing my initial pruning cuts is not a good plan ...
