Gardening With Climbing Roses
Gardening With Climbing Roses
There are roses for almost every type of gardening. So which do you use when you have some vertical space such as a wall or blank side of a house or even an ugly old fence just begging for the splash of color roses can provide? Why, you can use climbing roses and ramblers of course.
Climbing roses can be used on some type of support system, be it a trellis, archway, pergola or garden fence. They can also be used laterally like along a driveway or next to a wall, as seen in the picture to your right. In fact, they can be used in any type of climbing structure.
These roses have arms which can be used to climb up or along a wall. So what you need to do is train the climbing roses up the nearest object that you can find and support it’s weight by loosely tying its tendrils to the object. If you have already trained the climbing roses up a trellis or other support, you can now use them as support for a flowering climbing plant you have in your garden.
Training of climbing roses and considerations similar to training any other rose plant involves training the climbing arms to grow vertically along a support or railing, and then to follow that same pattern horizontally as they grow (pressing air roots into the ground when planting). This will keep the roses from spreading out or taking over your garden.
As mentioned before, train the legs of your climbing roses to grow vertically along the support or fence. This will keep the legs and the root system useful. You can train the legs to dig deep or shallow along the fence, as seen in the picture to your right; this is important as it will save the plant from soil and weight issues along the fence.
Other types of climbing roses include ramblers and ever-blooming climbers. Ramblers grow short and have trained legs; ever-bloomers have an open flowering stem and grow horizontally with leaves growing along the stem.
As I mentioned above, these are essentially mini roses. Therefore, they take up less room than standard roses and are particularly good for small gardens. Good choices for hanging baskets are climbing roses with flexible hanging line and trailing roses.
The later of these, known as trailing roses, are great for covering outdoor Copperangling structural supports; these are long vines that trail or climb support down to a lower support and then turn around. The hairiest of the trailing roses have tricyrtis orchids and the warm-toned seek the sun in groups.
The picture to your right shows ever-bloomers; these roses have no horizontal growth and grow vertically past their equilibrium point. I must warn you that these may be migraine friendly.
Other types of climbing roses include portulaca or big bud climbers. They are popular with lavenders.
Pruning of climbing roses is fairly simple. As you can see in the picture, trim one side of the plant to remove an unsightly bulk. Then prune the other side to about an inch from the ground. It’s easy then to see why they have been dubbed the ” declines” of the rose family.
As you can now image, trimming climbing roses is easy. Pruning climbing roses promotes new growth which maximizes blooms. It also keeps the plant from becoming bare and makes your pruning job so much easier!
As always, stay tuned for more articles on rose gardening and rose trimming.
Happy rose planting…it’s what we all need!
Allow me to amend your Rose Garden entry to include a link to this article.
