Types of Roses & Pruning

I have an e-mail from Joanne who says, “is it too late to cut back the dead branches on a knockout rose? Also, is it okay to trim back the rose of Sharon’s right now?”

You can trim back the rose of Sharon’s when they are just barely getting leaves or starting to get their leaves. I would always recommend fertilizing after pruning with the all-season fertilizer.

The roses, that’s a great question. Dead wood can always be cut out of roses at any time you find it. Leaving the dead wood on the rose doesn’t do the rose any favors. We had a pretty tough winter this year. I even noticed on some of my knockouts at home. They’re coming back really good now, but I do have a few brown canes in there, which are the old stems from last year, and I need to get in there and trim those out. The sooner you do that, the easier it is. There’s less foliage to try to work around.

There are some beautiful roses available at Rohr’s. We only get one shipment of these a year. There are the long stem hybrid tea roses, and of course, all the climbing roses are here. Some really cool colors and unique varieties that only come in once a year in the spring. The hybrid tea is what’s called the long stem cutting rose, that you would use to cut and put in a vase.

Climbing roses, there’s all different types that vine, and those types of roses grow well on a trellis or an arbor or something like that. And then you have grandiflora and floribunda roses. Those are more like a shrub rose. Now, we do get certain shrub roses year-round, the knockout and the drift series, but these are more of an old-fashioned shrub rose, and they’re generally only available one time in the spring, and they have very unique colors and a much larger bloom than the shrub roses we carry year-round.

When you’re trimming roses, not a lot of people realize this, but if you really look at a rose, you’ll see roses have sets of three leaves and sets of five. Whenever you’re trimming a rose, you want to trim back to about a quarter inch above the five-leaf set, because that’s where the new growth is going to come out of. Now, if you trim down to the three-leaf set, the growth will come from down below that at the next five-leaf set. You want to trim down to just about a quarter inch above a five-leaf set of leaves that come off the plant. If you’re not sure, stop in the nursery. We’d be more than happy to show you how to properly prune.

A few years back we did training sessions at Rohr’s, and we talked about roses. That’s on the radio’s YouTube channel right now, and we’re going to make it more readily available for folks to check out, because all that advice still stands.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).