Hey, good morning, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm again
I want to show you today how to prune a severely overgrown rose and this one is severely overgrown
It's probably been in the ground for close to 20 years
It's a red double knockout rose and the red double knockouts
If you're not familiar with them are a very common rose on the market the knockout series
Makes up a substantial portion of all the roses sold for gardens in North America today
It actually has a decent little scent it blooms non-stop
All year is fairly resistant to foliar disease and they've marketed it as a sort of a bulletproof
reduced care plant
Which is all fine and all true except that you can't ignore it forever or else it will get to this size here
So I'll be pruning it down. I do actually like these roses but they're a bit common for me
They don't need my help in propagating them. There's lots of people selling them. So I have recommendations that will fulfill some of the similar
qualities in the garden but aren't quite so common and I'll show you those towards the back end of the video just a couple of
Recommendations of roses that are trouble free and adaptable but aren't quite so common as a knockout
Before I get going with the pruning job here. Let's have a look underneath the plant and see what its condition is
All right, looking under the skirt of this thing I can see that it's actually not
One rose. It's three roses one there. That's the base of one of them
Here's a second one and
There's a third one here, but there's something wrong with this one
It's actually
Split and crack down the middle here. If you look there you can see that it's detached
This is right beside a roadway and it's actually been hit by a truck being backed into by a truck
So, "Can I save it" is the question and the answer is that if I pull on the stem here I
Get a lot of sway there. Even if I were trying to save it this portion here
Of course is just detached from the the stem entirely
This one here is rocker around so freely that I don't think it will ever make a good rose again
and because I have such
Such a well-grown
Grouping of roses and I have two other healthy roses to go with I'm not even going to try to save it
So I'm just gonna saw that one off at the base pull it out and continue on to the rest of the pruning
All right before I get to lopping this thing
Let me show you some of the tools I'll be working with normally when I'm pruning roses. I'd go with my just
Trusty Felco pruners here. My hand bypass pruners for small cuts. This is perfect. But because I'm dealing with a beast here
I'm gonna go ahead and
upgrade to
my
bypass loppers
Now bypass is the style of the blade and I'm not sure you're gonna get a good enough close-up view of this
But maybe I'll insert something is that this blade here passes by?
this stationary part here the hole or the thing that's gonna cradle the the stem in there when you close it and
When it passes by it it shears off the plant material
There's another style called an anvil crooner where this just goes against a piece like this and sort of
Crushes the plant material and I don't know why they make it. Maybe somebody can answer for
But I don't know why you'd want to crush your stems before you before you cut them. I also brought with me today a
Small pruning saw just in case there's something thicker the dot can't get around and i'll have to cut that out
So I went ahead and sawed off the base of that badly damaged rose in the group and now I'm ready to start my main
Pruning the thing is from where it is right now. I can't see anything
I can't see where I'd like to make the structural cuts
And I know that I want to take this thing down to at least half its height
I can even go deeper if I wanted to but for now
I'm gonna go down to about half its height and to do that. I need to see what I'm doing
So I need to make some rough cuts. I'm not gonna pay any attention to where the buds are
I'm not gonna pay any attention to
Angles of cuts. I'm just gonna go quick. I'm gonna do it with my Laufer
This one here. I need to clean my blade before I get started. I've used this Laufer on other roses in my garden
So I'm gonna put some quaternary disinfectant on here
Just to get rid of any chance of passing viruses or bacteria or any other diseases
between the roses I make sure I'm running with a
Good sharp blade which I've already done. I've sharpened the blade on this one here and
Lastly before I get going here
I'm gonna go ahead and put on some work gloves
I'm just going with regular heavy work gloves because they're what I have with me. All right, so hang tight
I'm just gonna leave the camera on and start hacking away at this thing
And you can see I'm not taking too much time with decision-making on any individual cut otherwise this will take me forever
I'm just trying to roughly get a lot of material off the top of it so I can see closer in and then decide which
stem stay and which ones go
All right
So as you can see what I just did there took very little in the way of skill or finesse
It was just me and a big pruner
To a height where I can actually see what I'm doing now
I'll get in closer and start making decisions on shaping the rose and which stems I want to try to keep
So now that I've opened it up so I can see what I'm doing
I can start following some of those pruning rules I outlined
So for instance if I want to look for dead damaged and crossing branches, I can just zoom in here and see
but yeah, those ones are badly crossing and if I
aim the camera down and
Back up a bit
You start to see that I need to make some decisions on
big pruning
Like what are the large stems that I want to keep on this plant? And
truth be told this one grows right into
The center of the plant so I'm going to take that one down with mile offers and you can see these loppers can handle
Quite a large
Get that out of the way quite a large branch like that with no trouble at all. It isn't crushing it
It isn't
Splintering it it's just a nice clean cut down low there and maybe I can zoom in on that as well
So this may be the trickiest and most
intimidating bit here is when you have all of these stems just a nest of stems coming out there and
You have to decide which ones stay and which ones go, so I'm going to start working on that here
I'm gonna try to comment on why I'm choosing to get rid of the stems that I am but down here low
There's quite an old stem with a lot of black
or dark-colored
Wood on it
so you see there that there's really
It's quite an old piece of wood with some dead craggly material on it so that I want to take out
To clean up the shrub
In towards the center here I like to clean it up at the center, so there's better air circulation
So I'm gonna get those out of there. And in fact, I think this one is already cut. There you go
so I'll pull that one out and
There's a dead bit hanging off of this branch here. And actually that's coming right from the base. So
I'm gonna take that out and
That out again
aiming towards cleaning up the center of
the rose
Once you have a bit of a view
In the center of the Rose
You can actually start making some decisions about what you'd like to keep like for instance
Back here. I've got a nice
Bit of a younger branch that's heading out at a good angle
Towards the outside of the Rose. I think I'd like to keep that one
But I don't want to keep it at full height
So I'm going to take it right back
To here
Now I told you I don't pay a lot of attention
To which way the buds are facing but I do pay attention that there is a bud that looks promising
Right up at the top of this branch here. So
I'm going to leave that on and then start looking for more wood to take off
Some people claim that there's a rule that you shouldn't take down more than a third of the wood on a rose at a time
and
You can already tell that I'm going much much heavier than that
I'm happy to take a bunch down from this rose because my experience has shown me that
knockout roses
In general or in specific and you know, a lot of roses in general will actually recover nicely
From a deep prune if they're overgrown and it's at the right stage of the season
And the right time of the season
When I say that is when there's still some time for the plant to recover. So right now we're in late May
and
I
Have all of June July August September for this to recover and get ready for winter
Some of these pruning choices are rather arbitrary
You know, do I like the shape?
Is it does it feel balanced that's quite arbitrary, but you know
You're gonna have to make those decisions and tell you the truth
You can't go too far wrong because the rose will grow back in in the places where it needs to as long as you've left
some of
the the
Framework in there the rose will grow in the direction it needs to fill in
Starting to get some
happiness here
And yeah, it seems like a really really deep cut now
But that's okay. I'm just going to take a few more cuts just to balance it here
And then I'll do some cleanup
So, let me give you a look at the results here
You can definitely see there are two roses here now and what I've done is I've met them nice and open to the center
sort of vase shaped
None of the branches are really interfering with each other's space
He would definitely call this a heavy prune
I took off well more than two-thirds of the height of the plant and
Here's the second one and
You can see that once you get going on this
You could actually put these two branches here as much as you want still like interesting face
We're not rubbing. They're not causing a problem
But as they begin to grow it's something I might want to look at again and decide whether I want to eliminate
One of those but you can see that in general
Every branch has its own space in the shrub and
That it's now ready
To recover now I can already hear
You guys asking for an update to this? That was a really really deep prune Jason
Let me show us that it actually worked well happily. I had some forethought on this and last summer. I
pruned a
Matching set
over here
And you can see that the height of it is
Getting back to height now, but it's way way way more manageable total height of that. It's probably somewhere around
Four and a half feet right now
Lots of blooms on it and I followed exactly the same process just cutting it down
From what it was a tall shrub equal in size to this one. We're just bringing it down
To the bare bones of what I want to see growing
All right, so I know this video is running long
but I promise to show you a couple of
Examples of roses that have some of the same qualities as knockout roses in terms of being carefree
Compact quite nice to grow and this is one of them. This is 'Rose de Rescht' from a very different class of roses
It's a Portland rose. So it's an ancient rose and this one here has beautiful
quartered blooms and the scent on it is a
Outstanding I think it combines some of the best qualities of the strong perfume of damask roses
With the long-lasting fragrance of the gallicas so it's a fantastic shrub
and as I say compact with minimal shirt pruning
Fairly carefree in the landscape. It's just it lives here
It does its thing it combines well with the other stuff in the garden
Couldn't ask for more from a rose another rose
I have no hesitation recommending as this one here Sally Holmes with these big white flowers
actually
they start out in bud as
Kind of an apricot color and then open out to these sort of light pink to white blooms
overall when it blooms that heavily because it's got big clusters of flowers it can resemble a hydrangea in the garden in terms of being
Adaptable it can take a little bit of shade. It can take a little bit of poor soil
It's a it can be trained as a climber if you want it to or be kept down low as a shrub like this
So in terms of it being an adoptable easy to grow garden shrub. There's it's hard to beat Sally Holmes
Alright, thanks for sticking it out today with me
I know it was a bit of a longer video, but I didn't want to skip any steps while we went through how to
Rehabilitate your overgrown roses, I guess in summary I'd say you've got to be a little bit courageous and take those hard cuts
I know it looks a bit scary to cut your rose that low
But about the worst thing you can do to an overgrown rose right now is leave it alone
at one last thing I'll say is it might be a good time to introduce some compost or manure or a
Reasonable amount of fertilizer to help your rose to recover from that prune. Alright
Thank you so much for watching today and let me know how your pruning goes