Time to "Prune After Bloom" the Roses
Here at my Bedford, New York farm, it's time to "prune after bloom" the roses - meaning deadhead and trim all the faded flowers.
There are different pruning strategies for different times of the year, but overall the goals are the same - to keep the plants looking fresh and open, promote new growth and re-flowering, and to improve the overall health of the plant. Deadheading is one of the easiest forms of pruning - as blooms fade, just cut off the flower stems below the spent blossoms and above the first set of full, healthy leaves. Yesterday, my head gardener, Ryan McCallister, and our NYBG intern, Matthew Orego, pruned, groomed, fed, and watered the rose garden behind my greenhouse.
Enjoy these photos.
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- Just a few weeks ago, this garden looked like this – full of fragrant blooms. I planted more than 120 roses in this space and they’re all doing very well because of the nutritious soil and diligent maintenance.
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- Here, I have floribunda roses, hybrid tea roses, and shrub roses – mostly all soft creamy pink to lavender and yellow colors.
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- Look at the gorgeous, fragrant blooms – some were as big as the palm of one’s hand.
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- Hybrid tea roses, also called large-flowered roses, usually have only one flower per stem and tend to flower in three flushes from summer to late autumn. Floribundas or cluster-flowered roses have many flowers per stem and tend to repeat-flower continuously from summer to late autumn.
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- A rose is a woody perennial flowering plant of the genus Rosa, in the family Rosaceae. There are more than a hundred species and thousands of cultivars.
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- The leaves of the rose are described as “pinnate” – meaning there is a central rib and then leaflets off to each side, with one terminal leaflet. Rose leaves can have anywhere from two to 13 leaflets.
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- And rose stems are often armed with sharp prickles – they aren’t thorns at all. Unlike a thorn, a prickle can be easily broken off the plant because it is really a feature of the outer layers rather than part of the wood, like a thorn.
