Growing Climbing Roses
A truly Romantic Rose Garden would be incomplete without a gorgeous climbing rose showering its blooms across an archway. Climbing roses, unlike true vines, require support structures to grow upward. They do very well on fences or trellises and create attractive features to enhance the landscape in any garden. If given the right conditions, growing climbing roses is quite easy as they are relatively hardy and require less maintenance than other types of roses.
Giving Your Climbing Rose Support
Since climbing roses don’t have their own support structures, we gardeners need to help them along. Commonly, gardeners loosely attach the climbing rose to a structure such as an archway, or even wind it through a trellis. You could also grow your climbing rose on walls, fences, pillars or archways. Climbing roses don’t necessarily need to climb upwards. A great tip is to train them to grow horizontally as this will encourage many more blossoms.
Make sure that the support you choose for your rose is robust and sturdy enough as some climbing roses can grow quite large, almost thirty feet in height.
Ensure you have the Right Spot to Plant Your Climbing Rose
You need to plan carefully if you are thinking of growing climbing roses in your garden. Knowing that some of these rose varieties grow quite large you need to evaluate the space you have available and then decide which variety of climbing rose will be best. Smaller varieties grow to about seven feet but this may also depend on the climate in your area and you should ask local nurseries for advice.
Climbing roses, like normal roses, require decent amounts of sunlight so you need to ensure that you don’t plant them along a very shady wall. Even varieties that can tolerate some shade need at least four hours of direct sunlight daily.
To Prune, or Not to Prune?
There are different varieties of climbing roses that all require slightly different approaches to pruning.
Hardy climbers include those from the Multiflora class and Wichuraiana hybrids and are characterized by long, rather woody canes with small flowers borne in clusters. It’s best to prune these climbers rather vigorously to prevent them from becoming too bushy and overgrown. To prune these plants, you need to remove the canes that have had that season’s blooms. As soon as the last bloom is faded you should cut off these stems. The new canes which have developed at the base of the plant will reward you with next year’s flowers.
Tender climbers of the Tea, Hybrid Tea, Noisette and Bourbon varieties, for example, are quite different in their flowering approach. They tend not to bloom on new canes, but produce their best flowers from the short spurs growing out of older canes. You therefore shouldn’t prune these types of climbers with the same veracity as the hardy varieties. A more gentle approach should be taken and simply remove surplus ends to shape the climber. Very little pruning is required and probably is only necessary every second year.
Intermediate climbers are the most difficult varieties for which to give pruning guidance. Amongst these large-flowered hardy climbers are those which will require vigorous pruning and those which will do best with minimal interference. The lovely, large flowered Silver Moon, for example, needs aggressive pruning at least every second season to remove most of its growth. Other varieties though will require very little pruning. You really have to use your own judgement here. Assess how vigorously the plant grows during the season and then when it comes to pruning leave as many woody canes as possible.
Some of the more recent hybrids known as everblooming climbers don’t produce a second bloom if the old flower clusters are removed. This is contrary to most rose varieties which normally blossom with increasing vigour if old flowers are removed. So, don’t be too hasty in removing seed heads and old flowers.
Whichever variety you choose, you need to be patient before you reap the rewards of showers of lovely rose blossoms. It will take the plants a while to become established in your garden and provide you with the fragrant beauty of their colorful blooms.
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