What would the summer garden be without the delicate furls of roses? Yet these iconic blooms are often wrongly regarded as tricky. Methodical pruning, foliar feeding and dutiful deadheading are at the heart of many rose growers’ sworn-by practices – but are they really necessary?
“People say that when you prune a rose, you need to open up the centre and go stem by stem,” says Tony Hall, Head of Gardens at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. “But it has been proven that you can take a hedge trimmer to a rose without doing it any harm.” Other traditional pruning advice includes cutting at a 45° angle a quarter of an inch above a leaf axil that slopes away from a dormant eye – talk that can leave even the most experienced growers scratching their heads.
Yet, pruning a dormant rose in a carefree fashion is better than leaving it to grow leggy out of fear. Any pruning you carry out will keep your rose’s growth healthy and
