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Dr. Leda's Rose Journal |
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Never Prune Roses In the Nude
...unless your tetanus shots are up to date. Dr. Leda's favorite ironclad axioms for the Age of Anarchy.
By Dr. Leda Horticulture, O. R.
January, 2004
What is it that makes us so hungry for rules? Why do we have such a craving for structure and authority? Is it an artifact of our increasing reliance on niggling step-by-step technical manuals? Whether we're brewing coffee, mixing a martini, or tossing a Caesar salad, we seem to revel in the smug conviction that we must posses an arcane knowledge of the one and only correct method, a series of sacred and precise canons from which one must never stray.
Whenever I teach rose pruning classes, my pupils clamor for unassailable lists of hard-and-fast rules. They especially love those dogmatic decrees that contain words like "always," "never,"and "exactly." Novices are particularly eager, but I've noticed that even some advanced rosarians seem to be happiest when there's no room for creativity or improvisation.
New Updates to the Rose Catalog!
Happy New Year! We've added a number of new roses to our catalog, as well as updated pictures of a few of our roses. Get a thumbnail view of these updates here.
Coming Events in January and February
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Regan Nursery is hosting these on-site seminars during January and February:
- Roses and their Diseases
- Care & Feeding of Roses
- Rose Pruning Talks & Demonstrations
- The Secrets of Growing Citrus
For more information, see the complete announcement.
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New Wallpapers AvailableFor January, we've found a bautiful high-resolution picture of a Bourbon rose, La Reine Victoria. |
"Exactly what time of day on the 15th should we prune?"my students demand. "Precisely how many micrometers of tissue should be removed? Is it better to face east or west when approaching the plant? Do we breathe in or out on the down stroke when we cut?" Then they wait breathlessly, tablets and chisels poised, ready to carve my answers in stone.
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| Festive rose 'Knockout' never knows when to quit. |
"Oh for heaven's sake," I want to say. "Lighten up, relax. None of this matters. Just have fun! Give your roses a pretty haircut."I'm tempted to tell them it's even ok to prune blindfolded with a chainsaw, but I know they would blanch and make noises about wanting their money back. So instead I mumble esoteric proverbs like, "Pruning roses is more an art than a science,"and "Keep your eyes on the road, not on the map."At this point the students usually just roll their eyes and sigh.
However, something has occurred recently that has given me a bit more empathy for my beginning rose disciples: I have become an insecure beginner at a new pursuit myself, struggling to master a skill for which I posses no experience and very little natural talent. And boy do I crave rules.
It all started a few weeks ago when I had one of those Big Deal birthdays, the kind with enough candles to barbecue a full-grown moose and a rather alarming little zero dangling at the end. I was actually coping pretty well, aging gracefully on my divan beneath a penumbra of dignified angst and cold compresses, until my friend Wanda dropped by.
"Get up, darlin,"she said. "I've brought you a book for your birthday."I peeled away the wrapping paper and adjusted my new bifocals, expecting to find something like 101 Feeble Things to Do From Your Rocking Chair, or maybe Little Gray Buns for Dummies. Instead, it was a book about how to be a bombshell.*
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| 'Our Lady of Guadalupe' still going strong in January |
A bombshell? Like Mae West, or Jean Harlow, or Brigitte Bardot? Moi??? Well, the good news is, I discovered I'm not too old to hurt myself laughing.
Now Wanda has always been a natural bombshell. She was just born that way. I, on the other hand, sprang from my mother's womb already looking like the prototypical flat-chested bespectacled dour old-maid schoolmarm. For years I have played the prim, upright Miss Jane Hathaway to Wanda's voluptuous Ellie Mae Clampett. (Stop me if these erudite literary allusions are too much for you.) How in the world could I, especially at my newly advanced age, ever metamorphose into a piece of artillery like Wanda?
"Don't you worry, honey,"Wanda assured me as she tossed her curls and fluttered her lashes. "This book says anybody can do it, even if they're a thousand years old and built like an ironing board. Just follow the directions, it can't be that hard."
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Get it From AmazonThe Bombshell Manual of Style, by Laren Stover, Ruben Toledo. Hyperion Press; (May 2001) 208 pages. Author Tom Robbins wrote, "Stover, Forrest and their colleagues are . . . shrewd and insightfully observant field anthropologists . . ." |
The book did offer some basic guidelines. And yet a few hours later I found myself on the phone, pleading with Wanda for more specificity. "Precisely how many bright red toenails should peek through the marabou mules?"I demanded. "What is the exact thread-count of the perfect peignoir? Do I breathe in on the lift and out on the separate, or vice versa?"
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| Tea roses in bloom during December down south in Dr. Leda's garden. |
"Oh, for heaven's sake!"said Wanda. "Lighten up, relax. This is supposed to be fun! Rules are like training wheels: you're going to have to get rid of them if you really want to fly."
I realized then and there that Wanda, my very own ditzy bodacious bombshell guru, had handed me a great pearl of wisdom. Or at least another fine axiom I can use when I break the news to my pruning classes that, one by one, the old conventional rules are falling by the wayside as rosarians enter a grand new Age of Anarchy.
Let's take a look at some examples of how the empire is crumbling.
Old Conventional Rule: "Pruning cuts should always be made 1/4 to 1/2 inch above an outward facing bud, at a precise 45 degree angle."
Daring New Approach: Field trials conducted in conjunction with the Royal National Rose Society at St. Alban have consistently shown that rough pruning with a hedge trimmer induces stronger growth and an equally good or, in many cases, better flowering performance than traditional pruning.
Old Conventional Rule: "Once-blooming roses should only be pruned in early summer, immediately after they've finished blooming."
Daring New Approach: British nurseryman and prima rosarian John Scarman advocates multiple prunings for once-blooming old garden roses: when flower buds begin to to show color, again in late summer to shape the bush, and any time (yes, any time!) from autumn to spring, the bush can be sheared down from flowering height to pruning height--and you get to decide what height that should be.
Old Conventional Rule: "Roses should never be pruned too early; the new growth will be subjected to a greater risk for frost and freeze damage."
Daring New Approach: Renegade rebels from Vita Sackville-West to Rayford Redell have experimented with pruning in winter before the spring sap starts to run, and have discovered that their roses not only survived and bloomed at about the same time, but also produced longer stems and larger blooms than the spring-pruned roses.
"Stop! Stop!"I can hear my poor confused students wailing. "Isn't anything sacred? Aren't there any rose commandments that we can still believe?"
"Of course,"I will tell them. "I can think of at least one: Never use your No. 2 Felcos to curl your eyelashes while driving a speeding vehicle."
And if anyone hears about some famous rosarian who does it all the time, please, don't tell me. I'm really not ready to know.
