How do you like your roses—short, medium, or tall? Want to gaze down on knee-high bushes from full height? Or meet medium-tall plants face to face, so you can sniff their fragrance without getting a crick in your back?
Would you rather look up to extra-tall plants to enjoy their blossoms silhouetted against the sky?
The differences in height come from varied rose pruning methods and follow-up treatments throughout the season.
Primary Cultural Rules For Growing Roses
Primary cultural rules are the same for all—good stock planted in good soil, sufficient feeding and watering, and adequate pest control.
Growing roses need half a day of sunlight but can take some afternoon shade. However, too much shade makes them spindly.
Selecting Varieties
Select No. 1 bushes from a reliable nursery in varieties suited to your climate for planting.
The All-America Rose Selections choose Roses, and those which received a high rating from the American Rose Society do well in most sections.
A Guide for Buying Rose Plants may be free from the American Rose Society, 4048 Roselea Place, Columbus 14, Ohio.
Consider Rose Height
Many catalogs indicate rose height, though that given is often lower than the height your roses will attain under optimum conditions. Careful choice of types to fit specific locations prevents a lot of pruning headaches.
Soil and Location
Any location away from tree roots and where the soil has reasonably good drainage can be made right for roses by working it to twice the depth of a spade and incorporating plenty of peat moss, manure, compost or other organic matter, a little superphosphate, and perhaps some potash.
Slightly acid soil with about pH 6.5 is best, but roses are so tolerant of unfavorable conditions it seldom occurs to us to test the soil. Testing for pH may be important.
Recently, I was consulted about an old rose garden where Radiance canes were as thin as twine, and the flowers were similar to polyanthus.
The soil looked wonderful, but it tested pH 4.0-far too acidic even for azaleas. That led me to test soil in another garden where the blooms had become smaller than usual. Again a low pH was revealed, calling for an application of ground limestone.
Last summer, I visited the Gulf Stream Nursery at Wachapreague, Virginia. Even in July, tall roses in their wonderful display garden were covered with flowers of unusual sizes and colors.
I learned they had once been poor runts—the result of bone meal added yearly to a soil already too alkaline from oyster shells.
A soil test led to acidification with sulfur and a switch to cottonseed meal and acid fertilizers. The results were miraculous.
Proper Planting
Planting time is November and December in Florida, January and February in most of the South, November or early April in the Middle Atlantic States, and late April farther north.
Planting should be done as soon as the roses arrive. Unpack and place them in a pail of water while digging a large hole where roots can be spread out and down, usually over a soil mound. Place the bump on the main stem (bud union) at soil level—a little higher in a warm climate, a little lower in a cold one.
Fill in most of the soil, tamp it down with your feet, and water (or pour in the water first, and then add the soil so it is formed around the roots as the water seeps away). Then mound with loose earth and leave this on for two weeks after spring planting or all winter after fall planting.
Rose Pruning
When it comes to rose pruning, opinions conflict, and arguments start. Hybrid teas were pruned low to about 3″ to 6″ inches a generation or two ago and kept fairly low through the summer.
I remember how astonished I was when a textile manufacturer, who wanted his roses to conform to a rug-like pattern, told a garden club that Peace and other modern roses would not grow in his area. They would not tolerate his behind-the-iron-curtain methods.
Some exhibitors believe low pruning produces bigger but fewer flowers because all the food is diverted to them.
Others say, “Phooey, you can’t divert food that isn’t there, and unless a rose has sufficient foliage, it cannot manufacture enough carbohydrates to produce exhibition flowers.”
People in both groups win blue ribbons—even the Nicholson bowl, the highest American Rose Society award.
Harold Allen of Chillicothe, Ohio, writes that he grows large show blooms on bushes that are rather severely pruned in spring and does not get large blooms on tall bushes.
Fred Glaes of Reading, Pennsylvania, produces his prize-winners on tall bushes with a few main canes. I saw these last year.
Tall Pruning
The hybrid teas looked like tree roses, only bigger and better. But when Fred switched to tall pruning, he had to remove every other bush to make room for those left. Dr. 0. M. Harper of Clendenin, West Virginia, gets numerous trophies for long-stemmed beauties from high-pruned bushes.
Down South, we expect to see tall roses. Here in the North, we are gradually learning that we can have them in most years, too.
The tall roses in the garden of Mrs. John Signaigo of Park Ridge, New Jersey, impressed North Jersey Rose Society members at a meeting held there last June.
Dr. R. Milton Carleton reminds us, in the American Rose Magazine, that a rose is a woody shrub, and the lower any woody shrub is trimmed to the ground, the fewer early flowers it will bear.
If you whack canes down to 3” inches, you get only 30% percent of the bloom you would otherwise have in June.
He believes that pruning cannot permanently overcome the innate habit of a plant. With roses, the owner pays the price for fighting nature.
As Fred Glaes says, “If you prune back to the main cane in spring, instead of cutting last year’s growth, you delay June’s bloom by about a week.”
Moderate or High Pruning
Advocates of moderate or high pruning agree on the following: Early in the season, cut out with a pruning saw, old, unproductive canes at the base, and dead canes and stubs. Cut out weak and diseased canes, all twiggy growth, and branches crossing in the center.
Leave three to six strong canes and prune them to desired height but above the first fork, making slanting cuts just above good eyes. Generally, prune back until the cane is the size of a lead pencil.
Pruning of floribundas is restricted to cutting out dead canes and sometimes shortening the tips. Kirsten Poulsen and Betty Prior grow to 7’ or 8’ feet, while Pinocchio and Goldilocks find their natural level at 3’ to 4’ feet.
Roses For Cuttings
Hybrid teas for cutting and exhibition should be disbudded by pinching out small side buds near the terminal flower bud. Some growers also rub out extra leaf buds, ensuring that only one shoot arises from any point on a cane.
Cutting roses for bouquets throughout summer is a pruning operation and should be done properly.
On a new bush, the first flowers are cut above the top leaflet, but as the season advances, longer stems are possible.
Cut roses from established bushes can often be taken with 24” to 30” inch stems, especially towards fall. It is better to do this with varieties like Helen—Traubel than to let the bush get too tall.
If you want your garden to be at its best on a specific date, or if you plan to exhibit in a fall show, cut some canes back 45 to 50 days earlier.
The photograph of Mrs. McNeill’s Montclair garden on page 65 was taken on October 1, the day it was opened for a garden tour. In preparation for this event, the bushes had been lightly pruned during the middle of August.
Feeding
Most gardeners who win prizes with their roses like to use cow manure but must follow the old rule of putting it on frozen soil in winter. They wait until spring.
The last time I called on my friends, the CoCrofts in Thomasville, Georgia, Chris was jubilantly unloading manure from the piano truck.
He had discovered it in the country on his way to deliver a piano. The result of his efforts is recorded on the cover of the American Rose Magazine in September 1952. The picture shows Katie gazing fondly at Peace —the McFarland District Trophy winner.
Mrs. Signaigo swears by cow manure applied to her rose beds in early spring and left on as a summer mulch.
Commercial fertilizers are also used after pruning, June bloom, and August. This program can be supplemented with liquid feeding applied to soil or foliage.
Fred Glaes went in for an organic mixture of two parts each of cottonseed meal, fish meal, dried blood, and wood ashes, with one part each of bone meal and shredded seaweed. This encourages good basal breaks, so there is always a new cane to replace an old one.
Mulching
Growers of big roses usually mulch rather than cultivate. They do, however, use different materials.
Ground corn cobs are popular in the Middle West and buckwheat hulls in the East. Peat Moss has devotees, even though it requires a lot of watering.
Sawdust, shredded tobacco stems, and even grass clippings are satisfactory. Mrs. Signaigo credits her fine roses partly to a 3” inch mulch of well-rotted, sifted oak leaves put on in fall. She uses no other winter protection.
Mulches keep the soil cool and crispy, reduce weeding and watering, and prevent disease by acting as a mechanical barrier between black spot spores formed in old leaves on the ground and new leaves overhead.
Watering
Adequate moisture is the most important requirement for obtaining either big rose bushes or blooms.
A thorough weekly soaking keeps roses in flower all summer and provides fine quality for autumn exhibition.
This has been vividly demonstrated to me during our past two summers of drought. Where gardeners could not supply water, the plants stopped blooming and had many dead canes and foliage that appeared diseased.
Controlling Pests
You can’t get quality roses when red spiders and black spots defoliate the bushes or when aphids, thrips, or mildew deform buds.
Even if you have a perfect flower, you won’t win blue ribbon roses if leaves are defaced by leafhoppers, skeletonized by rose slugs, or chewed by beetles.
Good flowers and perfect foliage mean treatment every week, from when the bush leaves out in spring to hard frost in autumn.
Dusting and Sprays
Dusting is easier and more apt to be applied on time, but there is evidence that some sprays result in a larger, heavier bush.
DDT included in the dust without a miticide (such as Malathion, Aramite, or Ovotran) and the syringing action of a spray often means defoliation by spider mites and consequent stunting of bushes.
Captain, a new fungicide effective for black spot control, provided a growth impetus when used as a spray in Texas experiments, which it did not have as dust.
The new Karathane (Mildex) is effective for mildew but must be used cautiously. The right combination spray or dust for your circumstances may have to be found by trial and error.
The best preparation for winter is a healthy, happy bush, hardened off gradually by withholding food and water after August, except that which nature supplies. It is necessary to withstand a normal New Jersey winter.
A soil mound does not harm, but blackened canes that must be pruned to the ground in spring often result from leaves, manure, and other materials that keep canes moist and warm. Avoid fall pruning, for it increases winter injury.
All of this takes less time to do than to tell. This past season, I doctored 53 gardens, pruning roses moderately in spring, feeding twice, mulching, and spraying weekly as the weather allowed. In gardens where I could time the sprays well, there was no leaf with a black spot the whole summer.
Disease Treatments
In other gardens, where rain or rose meetings intervened, making an interval between treatments too long, I plead guilty to a little disease.
The same combination spray (Tri-Ogen) was used in all gardens. It contains lead arsenate for chewing insects, rotenone and pyrethrum for sucking insects, ammoniacal copper, and Fermate for diseases.
To this basic spray, I added Aramite for red spiders from May to August, lindane for thrips in June, and DDT when leafhoppers moved over from apple trees in October.
I made two applications of Karathane when mildew was serious in late summer, and next year, I may add captan in the gardens where the black spot is a serious problem.
44659 by Cynthia Westcott