Does anyone know: I “inherited” a rose garden growing out of control. I pruned them down to the first node - about one foot tall canes. And, I was also told to cover them with burlap and mulch. These huge mounds of mulch look ridiculous!
Is this correct?
I should add this extreme mulching (see original post) is supposedly to winterize the roses. My winters are average -not as harsh as the mid-west, for example. I present this info since it seems important to those giving answers and tips on caring for roses. Also, I don’t know the exact variety, but my “advisor” suspects they fall into the category of “modern roses”.
Thanks for any help,
i inherited a climbing rose that was growing out of control and hadn’t bloomed in 5 years when we bought our house. i trimmed it down to about 1 foot from the ground three years ago, and the thing now has canes that are over 12 long, and blooms like crazy every summer.
i have 7 rose bushes, and live in michigan. every winter, i put them “to bed” by putting them inside plastic rose covers, and filling the covers with leaves and pine needles. i’ve never wrapped them in burlap, but i have heard of people doing it. for what it’s worth, my friends in the U.P., where it starts snowing around mid-october, never wrap theirs in burlap either. the important part is to make sure that the roots are well protected from the cold. that’s why you mulch them. leave them undisturbed over the winter, i never uncover mine until the last frost date is past. uncover them, rake your mulch out, trim any black canes away, (down to where they turn green again), give them a nice fertilizer breakfast, spray with bug/fungus/mold spray or use sevin dust, and they should stay beautiful for you. don’t be afraid to really prune them, too. sometimes they need “tough love”. any canes that are crossing each other, that have blackened over the winter or have spots where the bark is rubbed away need to come out. prune them all the way back to the main branch and dust with sevin dust to discourage bugs from munching on the new cut.
now is the perfect time of year for rose cuttings (assuming that you live in the northern temperate zone)
Cut an eighteen-inch section of stem, remove any leaves/shoots from the bottom 15 inches and bury it vertically so that about four inches (with the remaining leaves/shoots) are sticking up out of the ground. leave it there for the winter and it will (probably) develop it’s own roots. If you have heavy clay soil, a handful of sharp gravel at the bottom of the hole when you bury it, will improve the success rate.
It may not grow quite as vigourously as a grafted rose would, but it’s a good way of propagating climbing roses if you have a large fence or arbour to cover.
Here’s two ways of looking at it.
First, yes, what you did is correct. This is a valid way to protect roses for the winter. If you live in an area where this isn’t really necessary, it won’t hurt them. Also, as for looking ridiculous, it probably doesn’t look any worse than when it was overgrown and out of control.
On the other hand, the roses have survived all these years without being covered. So you probably don’t need to do this.
I’ll bet you have some fabulous roses next spring!