I'm at Fenton House in North London which has a gem of a garden designed by
the National Trust to surround this magnificent historic house.
The gardener in charge here, Andy Darragh is a big fan of roses and today he's going to show us how he prunes them.
So you've actually started pruning these climbing roses already?
Yeah and this one is a really lovely rose, it's called Rosa Rauchenblauer and it's actually a rambler.
It's a kind of lavender mauve colour and when it dilutes in the sun
the the petals sort of go a little bit blue but I really love it because it looks great
in front of the hot colours of the border down below in the summer so up here what I'm doing is I'm trying
to be able to see what we want to prune and so one of the first things I do
is I spur-prune or cut back all of these long bits. These are the bits that have flowered.
You can see the hips on them there, and so I cut all those back just so I can see what I'm doing.
And I pull all this down and as I'm pulling down I look for any of the knots that I tied in last year
and I untie all of those and whilst I'm untying, I'm spur-pruning.
OK so those side-shoots that you're shortening, you know that you're not going to need that growth next year
that's no use to you?
Definitely not going to need them for next year but whilst I'm pruning I am leaving these longer ones that I could possibly maybe use.
OK, yeah because they're going to produce nice flowering shoots next year.
and we might tie those in but at this stage I'm just leaving it to give me as many options as possible
because if this breaks, I've taken that one off already.
So you've got loads of nice stems here haven't you? How do you decide which ones to keep and which ones to remove?
Sure, yeah, loads of nice stems. This one here for example is like the Ferrari of stems, you can see that when I tie that in horizontal
it will flower all the way along that stem whereas this one here, it's good but it's probably second best.
So I'll be looking at things like that to remove.
OK so can you just use secateurs to prune that off, it's quite thick isn't it?
That one I would probably use my loppers.
OK, yeah and I see that leaves three nice stems now to tie into that space.
Absolutely yeah, so we can start to bend this one down, this one maybe can go up and across, when I'm tying I always start from from the bottom and work my way up
but I do look at the stems and I looked at this one which was going horizontal last year, I was looking at that one there,
if you can see that one Becky, it's got some stuff right at the end, all the lovely new shoots
so I'm going to be sending that one up to the top.
Because you've got quite a high wall to fill haven't you?
Yeah and also where I'm stood, underneath me is the salvia that gets up quite high, so it's nice to have the whole wall evenly spread
so although this one's going straight up it will be doing the horizontal at the top and what I tend to do is I get the framework done first
before before I tie in the rest of that length of that shoot, or else I'll end up untying lots of things if I didn't want it where it was.
I've made that mistake before.
OK so you're getting them nicely spaced out, one per wire if possible.
Yeah and then I try not to have anything crossing.
Once you've got it all spaced out you can then go back to the stems that you tied in originally and finish off the ends.
Yeah and by making them quite horizontal like that one, you're going to have really good flowering all the way along it aren't you?
and if people have a smaller wall, a short fence, really they want everything to just be going horizontally.
Absolutely, yeah and when this is finished, most of it will appear like most things are going horizontal.
So we will have that one going along there for example
and then this one going along there, and then this one going along there.
So sort of fanned out like that, in a nice arch.
I think I'll let you get on with that then.
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