Yesterday I went to Garden Valley Ranch to watch my pal Fallon teach a pruning class. I was there ostensibly for moral support, but I was reminded of something wonderful and heard some new things.
Fallon started her class with an account of an experiment that was conducted some years ago in England. The experiment was conducted on three big rose beds. For 10 years or so, the first bed received no pruning at all; the second was pruned according to the rules I learned when I planted my first rose: cut everything down to 12-18 inches (or at least by one-third) and cut out any cane that's not the diameter of at least a pencil; the third bed was pruned with electric shears.
To the surprise of many people, the results showed that the roses in the first bed, where no pruning whatsoever was done, were the healthiest and produced the most blooms and the biggest blooms. The roses in the other two beds were virtually the same in terms of health and bloom size and quantity, so meticulous pruning is really no better than whacking away at things with an electric hedge clipper.
This was something I already knew, but it was nice to be reminded of it at a time when I'm still about a month behind in my winter pruning.
Obviously, you still have to remove all dead wood in all three cases, but the upshot is this: If you have room for your roses to grow as much as they want to grow, relax and let them do their thing. Pruning is for people who have to keep their roses within certain bounds, as I do (for lack of space). In addition, pruning hybrid teas down to 12-18 inches is important if you want long-stemmed roses.
I have to prune my roses because I have way too many of them. I use the careful pruning method because I don't have an electric hedge clipper. Besides, that tends to leave little bits of dieback on every stem, which are visible until the foliage grows up around them, and I'd rather have a cleaner look after pruning.
I learned a couple of new things, which I'll report in the next post. This one's getting too long.
