Summer-pruning roses

About this time I find all my roses, and everyone else's too, are getting a bit wayward.

They've mostly finished flowering, bar a few late flushes, and they suddenly start shooting great thick stems skywards in a bid to take over the world. This is a Good Thing on the whole, as it means they're very healthy and well-established, and you should be able to look forward to a nice handsome display next year.

However - if they're anything like the 'Perpetually Yours' climbers on the fence between me and my neighbour, they can become a serious hazard. This summer while my back was turned they shot up several massive stems above the fence, a good 6ft long, which began waving about spectacularly in the recent gales threatening to whip off the heads of sundry children and household pets passing by.

'Perpetually Yours', incidentally, is a lovely rose covered in froths of pretty frou-frou noisette flowers in palest yellow. I have two, which took a while to establish in my sandy acid soil, but which are now spectacular each summer. Their only real shortcoming is that they don't stand up to weather very well, dissolving into soggy brown soup in heavy rain, like many roses I've found - a problem strangely unmentioned in the brochures. Mind you, the tried-and-tested favourites - 'New Dawn' and 'Dublin Bay' in my garden - seem to escape this problem.

But I digress. The point is, everyone talks about pruning roses in late spring (or late winter, if you're me) but nobody mentions that they need summer pruning, too. This time of year I end up picking thorns out of my fingers yet again, tying in wayward stems and cutting out any heading in the wrong direction.

I also cut back those long flowered stems by about a third - some of this has been done already in deadheading (which I'm intolerably bad at getting around to, though it doesn't seem to make much difference to the number of flowers I get) but there are always some which still flap about. This summer pruning will to some degree restrict growth, as all summer pruning does - but it's sometimes no bad thing to give roses a rap on the knuckles when they're getting too full of the joys of summer. Just don't do it any later in the season, as new growth will get knocked back by frost if it hasn't had the chance to harden off in time.

Rambling on

I'm coming to the end of the rose-pruning season at the moment and thank goodness for that - my fingers are full of thorns and my hands are so scratched it looks like I've been washing in barbed wire.

I'm ending the pruning season with a really tricky one, though: in my new garden, there's an old and rather dilapidated trellis fence across the back supporting three climbing roses - or are they rambling roses? That's the problem. The owner knows what one of them is - it's Albertine, which is a rambler, so that's fine. The other two are a mystery, and they're not the same as each other, either.

The difference between a climber and a rambler is quite a subtle one, but has quite an impact on how you look after them. As a general rule of thumb, if your rose is producing lots of whippy stems from at or near the ground, it's almost certainly a rambler: if you can see a framework of branches in the centre, from which the flowering shoots are coming, then you've got a climber.

Of course, there are, as always, exceptions to the rule, and I think I may have one here. The rose on the left-hand side is producing lots of long, whippy stems - but it also has quite an established framework. Now this could be because it's been quite neglected, so the whippy branches have been allowed to thicken more than they usually would - or it could just be a whippy sort of climber.

Oh dear... well, I hedged my bets and pruned it like a climber but leaving more of the whippy bits in than I usually would just in case it's a rambler after all. I shall wait until it flowers and take a sample or two up to Wisley just to find out for sure.

Oh yes, and the difference between caring for ramblers vs caring for climbers? You prune climbers at this time of year, taking sideshoots back to 2-3 buds from the central framework, but ramblers you allow to... well... ramble until August, when you remove one in three of the oldest shoots right down to the ground to thin them out a bit. Climbers, you see, flower on growth made this year; ramblers flower on growth that's matured from previous years. Which is why I'll be in deep doo-doo if I've pruned a rambler like a climber - because I'll have chopped out all those nice mature stems, and therefore the flowers... Well, time will tell, and luckily the owner is very understanding!

Out with the old...

...and in with the new. Having lost my lovely woodland garden in the hills, I've been able to say "yes" to a new client, someone who's been very patiently waiting for me for nearly a year now. So I have a new garden to look after - always exciting as you come across something you haven't dealt with before every time.

I'm starting for her regularly in the New Year, but I went in for a half-day clear-up the other day just to get a feel for the garden. My new charges this time include an unbelievable climbing rose, at least 20 years old and with a trunk the thickness of a small elephant's leg. They've had a problem with it as it was tied a bit haphazardly to the front of the house and blew off in the wind, so is now rather butchered to keep it within bounds. Time to get out my drill and vine eyes, and do a lot of persuading that this time it will work (honest, guv...)

The other large and very old shrub I'm looking forward to caring for is a Japanese quince - I'll try to take a photo of it and post it in spring, as it's the biggest Japanese quince I've ever seen, too.

I spent a while thinning it out as there was an enormous amount of dead wood in the middle - these are quite untidy shrubs when they're just left to grow, so they're usually trained to a wall, but in this case I can see why the client didn't want to as it's clearly going to be absolutely spectacular in flower. It had spread quite widely out from where it was meant to be so the clump needed reducing a bit. Hopefully though I haven't done too thorough a job, and it'll still be able to wow us all next year.

Plant of the month - June

Rosa "Dublin Bay"

I first spotted this lovely climbing rose in the rose gardens at RHS Wisley, where I was looking for a true, pure red. So often in roses you find reds that aren't red at all - they're orangey-red, or pinky-red, or scarlet (i.e. dark red). "Dublin Bay" comes as close as it's possible to get to a clear, pure, red red. The only downside I can detect is that it doesn't have any appreciable perfume. It's a robust, healthy plant that grows lustily but remains well-behaved: a rare combination that makes this rose all the more covetable. Its strong stems are a dusky shade of purple when young, adding to the charm of what must be one of the best climbing roses available anywhere.

Banksian roses

In two of my gardens now I've come across a Banksian rose, and in both cases the owners didn't know what they'd got. The sad thing is, that meant the roses had never flowered - because they'd been pruned in the late winter, like regular climbing roses.

Banksian roses are wonderful, though very rampant, climbers which flower on last year's growth. So every time you clip them, you're taking flowers off. Instead of pruning them at this time of the year - which will remove all last year's growth and therefore this year's flowers - you have to wait until the plant has flowered in May/June.

Then you either remove entire stems to reduce the size (and these are really, really big plants - they cover entire houses without even thinking about it) or take back side shoots to 3-4 buds. That'll give the plant plenty of time to produce new wood to flower the following year.

If you do prune it right, the plant will reward you with the most beautiful flowers - clusters of palest yellow buttons in profusion all over the plant. The species is white, but most plants turn out to be Rosa Banksia lutea - the yellow version, and a beautiful shade of yellow it is, too.