5 tricks for pruning your rose garden

Pruning is essential for maintaining the shape of your roses and promoting proper blooming. Learn which method works best for the roses in your garden.

• For the cleanest, least traumatic cuts on rose canes, use a sharp pair of bypass, or scissors-type, pruning shears; anvil-type shears can do damage by smashing the stems.
• To prune the largest canes on your bushes, use long-handled lopping shears.

To keep modern hybrid tea and floribunda roses blooming throughout the growing season, remove fading flowers before the seeds, or rosehips, can form.

• As the petals start to drop, cut off the flower just above the fourth leaf cluster, or the highest node that has five leaflets just below it.
• A new flowering stem will sprout from the node.

Prune reblooming roses in early spring just as the leaf buds swell.

• Begin by removing any dead or damaged canes, then take out any canes that grow in toward the centre of the bush and any that cross and rub each other.
• Cut off the suckers that sprout from below the graft union.
• Choose three to six of the strongest canes to keep and cut all the others off at ground level.
• Then trim the remaining canes to the desired height.

Roses that flower once a year should be pruned just after blooming.

• Trim as needed to create an open, balanced framework of sturdy branches.
• To keep the growth compact, cut back each cane by a quarter.

• Rake up pruned clippings and dispose of them, since they may harbour disease spores or insect eggs and larvae.
• For the same reason, rake up and dispose of fallen rose leaves in autumn.

Planted near rosebushes, lavender drives away aphids; sage, hyssop, and thyme deter caterpillars; and French marigolds may discourage nematodes.