[Upbeat string music]
My name is Larry Rupp. I'm one of the landscape horticulture specialists
at Utah State University and one of the questions that I frequently get is when
rose growers have a situation like this, where they have a long cane growing off
of their rose but no flowers on it.
Typically what this means is that--in this case, these are hybrid tea roses that
have been grafted onto a root stock, and sometimes the top portion or the scion
dies and then the root stock begins to grow on its own.
And the root stock has been selected only for the roots, not for flowers, so
typically, they have very few flowers.
Well, there's a couple of options to be done here.
One is to simply dig up the old root stock, throw the plant away, buy a new one
and replace it. Or another one that's kind of fun horticulturally is that we can keep
the root stock and take buds from one of these other hybrid tea roses that we
already have in the garden, bud them under the root stock, and start over again with
a new plant that will flower and produce the kind of color that we're looking for.
So what we're going to do is talk about how to take buds off of a plant that's
flowering like this one and we're going to bud it onto these--one of these root
stocks and show you how that's to be done.
The first thing that we need to do is we need to collect some bud wood, or the wood
that we're going to take the buds from. We can do that by taking a chute that we
know has flowers and that gives us the characteristics that we want and at the
base of each one of these leaves, there's a little dormant bud and that's the bud
that we want to put onto the root stock, but we don't want it to dry out, so we're
going to cut off the leaves themselves and just leave a little bit of the leaf
petiole. And then out toward the tip, the buds aren't quite developed so we're gonna
get rid of that. So we have a little piece here of what we could call bud wood or a
bud stick.
The other thing you may want to do is to remove the prickles. Believe me, it's a
lot easier to work with these guys if you're not jabbing yourself every time
you turn around.
So we've removed the prickles, we've got this nice bud wood, and now we're going to
try and put it onto this root stock. And I'm gonna show you an example here
that's a little bit high above the ground simply so it's easier to see it and to
illustrate the point. But normally, you'd put it down really close to the bottom so
that the entire plant would carry the new bud instead of part of the root stock.
So let me show you how we're gonna do this.
First thing I need to do is find a nice, smooth spot that I can go in and place the
bud. So I'm gonna remove these leaves. The plant doesn't really need 'em, and get a
nice, smooth piece of stem that I can come in and place the bud on.
The method of grafting we're going to use is called a T-bud and we do that by first
of all making a vertical cut through the bark into the cane and we want to cut
down to the end of the woody part and then we're gonna come across the top and make
a horizontal cut so that we get this T effect. We've got a vertical cut with a
horizontal cut above it.
At this time of year, the bark exhibits a phenomenon called "slipping," and if you
can see this, we can actually peel the bark away from the stem itself.
And that's important to this kind of budding, so we're gonna peel that bark
away just a little bit and get it to slip and separate. Now, that'll only work when
the root stock is actively growing. In the winter when it goes dormant, that bark
will be tightly held to the wood and we can't get it to slip, so this has to be
done in the summer or in the fall.
The next thing we're gonna do is collect the bud from our bud stick.
And the way we do that is to--again, the bud is in the axil of the leaf here.
We're gonna come in about a half inch below and make a cut with a knife that
just goes a little bit underneath the bud and then comes out above it.
And then we can cut that off and we have the bud.
The next thing we're gonna do is get rid of the woody portion that's in the middle
of the bud, so we can hang onto the bud and pull it apart like that.
And we'll discard the wood and what we retain is the bark, the leaf petiole that
I'm using as a handle, and the bud itself, which is inside there.
Okay, the next step is to thread the bud down inside of that T-cut that we've made
like this. So you can see here's the T, that vertical cut, and we've got the bud
and we're just gonna slide it right down inside there and then we'll cut off the
extra at the top of the T like that. So the bark is nicely wrapped around the
bud and the bud is laying up against the wood of the stem.
Once we have the bud in place, we need to tape it. Now tape serves two purposes--
one, it seals the bud so that it doesn't dry out and it also anchors it in place
so it doesn't break free or fall out or something like that.
And we can use various types of tape. This tape is a wax impregnated paper that
kind of gets sticky as you stretch it.
And we can carefully wrap it around like this and do the same thing on the upper
portion and generally with one like this, we don't cover the bud itself, but we try
and cover all the rest of the bud as much as we can.
And that's all there is to it.
Now what we would do is let this sit like this through the remainder of the summer
and fall and then next spring, that bud should begin to grow and we'll have a
new flowering scion, or upper portion of the rose, on this root stock we
already have.
Normally, after we bud a rose, in about three weeks it should be healed up and we
can take the tape off. These are some that I did not quite three weeks ago, but we're
gonna peel the tape off and see what it
looks like underneath and show you what happened.
This is a bud that we did a couple weeks ago and what I'm going to do now is peel
the tape off and see how it looks, and I'm doing that by cutting the tape on the back
side and then I'm going to carefully remove that from the stem.
And we need to shift our camera around here so that you can see.
Okay, this is the bud that was placed in the T and we can come in and remove what
was left of that leaf petiole and if it pops off like that, then we're generally
okay. And you can see that the tissue is still green, the bud's still there, and
all indications are that this is going to be successful.
Now, we won't really know until next spring when it begins to grow, but so far,
so good. It looks good and looks like it's healing in place.
Here's another bud that we did and I'll remove some of these leaves so that you
can see it. And I come in under here and cut that tape on the back side,
carefully remove it,
and there the bud is.
The petiole, if it breaks off, that's a good sign. Even though that's a little
discolored, if we look underneath it, it's green, the bud looks good and healthy, so
that's probably going to be a successful bud for us.
So in summary, this is just a fun little practice we can use to restore a root
stock that has lost the scion, or the upper portion of it that has the flowering
rose. Again, taking buds from a rose that we know will bloom, grafting it onto the
root stock, and we can be--we can restore it.
Generally, late summer to early fall is the best time to do that.
If it's early spring, the bud's aren't quite developed enough.
If it's late fall and in the winter, the bark won't slip and we're not able to do
the T-bud, so July and into August are the best opportunities to do it.
If nothing else, it's a lot of fun to try budding. It's a unique horticultural
practice that, while very old, very few people know how to do and can be a great
way to expand your horticultural skills.
Thanks for listening.
[Upbeat string music.]