The artless pruner

Rose pruning often occupies a large section of rose books but all the advice boils down to:

• Shrub roses and climbers don't need pruning except to keep them in check, and some larger roses are best with light trimming only.
• Floribundas and hybrid teas should be pruned hard in early March (i.e. well before budbreak), in order to encourage the production of a few very vigorous shoots the following year which will bloom abundantly.
• "Pruning hard" means reducing last year's shoots to about four, each about 6 inches long with 3 or four buds.
• Cut 1/4 of an inch above a bud, with a sloping cut, sloping down away from the bud.
• Cut above an outward facing bud.
• Remove entirely dead wood and weak shoots; eliminate crossing or inward facing branches, giving an open centre.

And that is it. Or is it?

Many books obsess about the minutiae of pruning. A few years ago a British consumer magazine ran a test on rose pruning techniques, subjecting identical beds either to so-and-so's pruning method X or to thingummyjig's pruning method Y. And as a control, one bed was just run over with an electric hedge-clipper. The roses were then assessed in the summer to see which pruning method gave the best bloom.

Come the summer there was no difference at all. If anything the massacre with the electric clipper came out on top.

This sort of anecdote is music to the ears of all those interested in reviving the rose hedge, but do who not want to have to surgically prune a long hedge. David JC Austin has pioneered the modern rose hedge using his family's English Roses. He has used the fantastic, very vigorous "Hyde Hall" rose as a hedge, trimming it back to "half its size each year using a hedge trimmer".

Rose pruning has not come much further than the recommendations of Mrs Gore in 1838 (see below), except we now have the mechanical hedge trimmer!

From: THE ROSE FANCIER'S MANUAL; BY MRS. GORE (1838)

"OF PRUNING AND TRIMMING. Some gardeners prepare their rose-trees for spring-pruning by a preparatory one in the autumn; which is superfluous, except for the sake of neatness. The tree should be subjected to the pruning knife early in the month of March; and all dead, sickly, or unsightly branches carefully removed. The shoots of the preceding years should be trimmed down to the second eye, in order to secure fine flowers. A few species, however, require to have longer branches allowed; while others need only be trimmed of their sprays to produce an abundance of flowers. On this point, experience is the only guide; for the extent of pruning and trimming depends, not only upon the species of rose, but upon the situation, soil, and even the temperature of the season.

When it is desirable to retard the flowering of a rose-tree by two or three weeks, it should not be pruned till the vegetation has commenced, and the shoots have attained an inch in length."