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Why Do We Prune? Back to Rosenut's Rose Care
The purpose of
pruning is to produce new wood. The energy that would have gone
into keeping the declining old wood alive goes instead into
producing new wood and flowers. Nature prunes during the winter
with ice storms and animals which eat the older wood and bark to
survive. In the process they trim the bush back. A cane will also
die back and if the dieback is not removed new wood will grow from
the first good bud below the dieback.
Unpruned roses in warmer climates will continue to grow and eventually become tangled, thorny, overgrown mixtures of old, dead and new growth. They will become unsightly. We assist nature by cutting out the old or dead canes so that new ones can be produced. Even Old Garden Roses, a lot of which flower only on 2nd year or older wood, requires pruning to remove older unproductive canes. To revive OGRs Rosarians advise removing all canes 3 years or older the first year. After that remove 1/3rd of the canes every year, always removing the older ones. This way you will have new wood plus two years of flower producing wood. OGRs which bloom on 2nd year wood are pruned after they bloom in the early summer. Bushes which bloom on new wood (These are most of the modern roses) should be pruned and shaped yearly in spring before the first bloom to promote more and larger flowers. It's done in the spring because nature dictates it with the spring rains, increasingly warmer and longer days, and the position of the sun.
Visit an old
overgrown cemetery and look at the oldrose bushes. They have
flowers but not many and the bushes will be filled with large
unproductive and dead canes. When you strip off the leaves
you don't actually produce dormancy. You cause the bush to refocus
itself on producing all new canes and leaves. It renews itself and
in the process does what nature intends it to do, propagate, make
flowers which turn into seeds (hips). By dead heading or cutting
the old bloom we force the bush to keep trying harder and harder
to make more blooms. That's why we stop removing flowers in the
fall. This signals the rosebush to start a resting period prior to
the next growing season so it can do it all over again.
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