The sorry evidence of the nearly uncontrollable human urge to re-do things, including Nature, is all about us but on my street in particular it has taken the form of a pruning mania. Front yards especially seem to excite the amatuer pruner's ambition. No hedge will be untrimmed, no tree unlopped, no shrub unsquared. My neighbors have produced cubed camellia bushes, trees with no branches, and an assortment of plant "balls on sticks."
The aesthetic nightmare produced by such "gardening" activity convinced me that pruning was a bad thing. When I had my own garden it took on a decidedly "natural" look, and I enjoyed marrying vine to shrub and generally letting things meld together. All my roses were climbers, and "old fashioned" which supposedly did not require pruning for flower production. In fact, these roses put out buds on older canes and so pruning would have reduced bloom. I wanted rose hips so did not even "deadhead" the spent blossoms. I tried to let things find their own shape.
Well, that lasted about a year. I found myself up on a ladder one late January, bleeding and entangled, hair to sock, in the massive brambles with a pair of pruning clippers in hand. I was not entirely able to let things find their own shape.
This winter, massive wind storms in December nearly flattened some of the 10-foot climbers growing along the fence and next to the house. They needed to be cut back severely just to be able to re-secure them to the wall.
It seems to matter little how you prune a rose. The fine points are definitely lost on a massive rambler that will spring out with hundreds of new canes no matter where you make the pruning cuts. I have found that with the climbers a "Y" shape works very well, especially if the rose in question is one that produces long canes. This shape forces blooms from the long lateral canes and keeps the center free of congestion.
I am sure, however, that without pruning the roses would be fine. They would bloom just as much and probably find a perfectly natural form. It is just me, the meddling human, that must impose my own sense of order on the plants whether they need it or not. It is, I confess, a nearly uncontrollable urge. To prune. So far, I have confined my clipping obsession to the forgiving and indomitable rose. But if the neighborhood is any indication, this is something that could easily get out of hand.
Posted by briggs at January 22, 2003 6:21 PM