[Music] Welcome to the Harkness Roses Nursery. This is where all the magic happens. I'm
Francesca. And I'm Phillip. Today we're going to be showing you how we propagate roses and
how to best look after them in your garden. And this is Maple who looks after them for us as well.
Thank you. Number one, we'd always say picking the right location in your garden is key, so making
sure that there's enough space so it's wide enough and also deep enough for the roots to go down.
Secondly, it's about making sure that the ground is ready for your roses so we always suggest doing
a really good mulch in the spring. You can use a well-rotted manure or even the compost
you've made in your own compost bin. Thirdly, we always say make sure your rose has got at least
as a minimum four hours of light a day. They prefer more but they will cope with four hours.
Another really important thing for roses is pruning. There are two times of the year that we
do recommend that you prune, the first one being an autumn prune which tends to be a lighter prune
and is most important for people that have quite windy or exposed gardens to prevent wind-rock.
The most important one though is in the spring and this is what we call a hard prune, so we recommend
cutting them down to about here. This just really helps the roses to come back good and strong
the next year. Another really important thing is disease prevention just like human beings when we
get stressed we're more likely to get ill so make sure your roses are well watered and well fed.
Another way to prevent disease is making sure that you pick a good disease-resistant variety.
Another really important thing to do in the summertime when your roses are
flowering is making sure you're deadheading throughout the season. It helps the rose put
energy into opening up these buds so you've got lots of beautiful flowers.
One of the things we have been doing is producing our rose plants from cuttings and traditionally
they're drafted in the field and we're using the cuttings for building up numbers of our
new varieties such as these ones over here. And as you can see from this tray, we've got 24 cuttings
in this tray, we've got 24 living plants. The way we do this is it's very simple but it does require
a lot of control. These cuttings were taken about five weeks ago and they're all beautifully rooted,
a nice root ball there ready for potting on and the reason we're doing this as I say is
the speed of building up numbers. And so the cuttings we take a snip off a plant
at this stage just before it flowers and then we cut off the waste and then we have one,
two, three, four cuttings and very simply we put them in one of these little plant cells and
in good compost and we leave them there. But it's not quite that simple because you do have to have
the right temperature, the right light regime, the right water regime, the right humidity. If you
want to do cuttings in your garden there's a much much easier way and the best time to do it is late
September. You want to get a stem which is nice and ripe and has flowered and it needs to be at
least 20 centimetres and 30 is plenty. You snip it off at the bottom and you snip it off at the top.
You remove the bottom one, two, three, four, five leaves and you'll notice I just pulled those off
and I counted to five but is about half the length of the stem you then take the thorns
off the section where the leaves have come off, and you will apply some rooting hormone that can
be a powder or a gel to the stem and that's when we need to get a pot and some compost
and you want a compost that drains fairly well and you have your pot, you fill it up with compost and
you put your cutting in the compost to the level of the lowest leaf and you do this once you go
back to your plant you take a second one and a third one and if you put three of them in
one pot the likelihood is that either one or two will live and they'll be quite happy. If you just
do one you'll end up with a pot with nothing. And you do this in late September, October.
The pot goes outside and I recommend that you bury it in the garden halfway it stops it blowing over,
it retains moisture and the cuttings will sit there over winter and by April,
early May when you just pot out of the ground you'll look and you'll see it's got roots there.
The mistake most people make is that when they've seen the roots underneath they think that's good
and they leave it but it will start shooting and if you let it shoot from the top it will continue
to shoot from the top and be a spindly plant once it's rooted and you start to see a shoot coming
that means that the plant is drawing moisture and food out of the compost then cut it back so
that only I don't know five centimetres left that will make it shoot from the base and it will make
the shoot stronger, it'll make the plants stronger and it will make you, the gardener, much happier.
If you have any questions about your roses, why don't you come
find us at one of the RHS Shows. Maybe we'll see you there. [Music]