Deadheading Roses - "hard"

I'm often asked about rose pruning, and one of the aspects which trips up a lot of people is the concept of dead heading.

So let's take a look at this topic: as with many aspects of gardening, it would be easier to teach you this in person - see my page on Garden Tuition for details! - but for now, let's take a quick canter through the basics.

What is dead-heading?

It's the practice of removing spent ("finished") blooms/blossoms/flowers. 

These three - left - are now what I call "going over" which means they have lost their initial beauty, the petals are starting to fade, droop, and curl: the flower has lost it's form, it is starting to look ragged.

Time to dead-head these ones!

Why do we dead-head?

Because once a bloom, or blossom, or flower, whichever name you prefer: once it's finished looking lovely, it will go to seed: it will create a hip (or a haw, I'm never quite sure of the difference), and it will consider it's work done for the season.

Because the whole reason for plants to grow, is to flower, set seed, and die.

But in our gardens, we want them to continue flowering again and again and again, and by removing the seed, we force the plant to produce another flower.

I know, I know, cruelty to plants: and people say to me "Oh, what a lovely job you have, working in harmony with nature..."  They have no idea that I'm torturing plants for a living (*rolls eyes*).

So by dead-heading, on a continual, rolling, basis, we prompt the plants to produce a succession of flowers for us.

How do we dead-head?

Don't just pull off the flower head (shrieks of horror), cut it off, with sharp secateurs or, if desperate, a sharp pair of kitchen scissors.

No, not the ones you use when cooking - an old pair.

There are three aspects of rose pruning which you need to get to grips with, and they are, in brief:

1) the sloping cut. Make your cut just above a bud, and don't cut straight across, cut at an angle sloping away from the bud. So that any water which collects on the cut end of the stem runs away down the stem, instead of being "caught" in the bud.

2) the outward facing bud. When deciding where to cut, pick a bud which is facing outwards: if you imagine yourself looking down on the bush from above, choose a bud pointing away from the centre. This encourages growth in an outwards direction, thus reducing congestion within the centre of the bush, which in turn allows good air flow, which in turn helps to reduce disease.

3) where to make the cut.....

This is the hardest concept for new gardeners to accept. When dead-heading, don't just nip off the dying flower, take off a good length of stem as well.

Here's a simple illustration: looking at this picture, taking that top left-hand flower, if you imagine that the flower is fading, many people would dead-head at the point marked A. 

That is, just below the flower.

It is better to follow the stem down into the bush, and cut it much lower, at the point marked B.

Why?

In simple terms, because if you look at the length of that stem - from B up to A and beyond - that's how long the stem grows before it flowers.

(This is a broad generalisation)  

So, when you take off the flower, the stem will immediately shoot from the next available bud - the outward facing one, if you did it correctly! - and will make that much growth again, before a bud appears.

This means that over the summer, your roses get taller and taller, lankier and lankier, and more prone to snapping and damage, not to mention that the flowers get higher and higher until they are out of sight!

By cutting back hard when you dead-head, you are "re-setting" that particular stem, and the new bud will appear at about the same height as the old one did.

When do we dead-head?

As soon as the flower dies! It's an on-going, continual, rolling process. In many of "my" gardens, I do all the dead-heading, and I do it every week. Sometimes there are many to be done, sometimes only one or two: and sometimes I have to be quite harsh, and remove a particular flower when it is only just going over, simply because I won't be there for another week, and I don't want to leave one which may look "sort of ok" today, but which will be brown and horrible in a couple of days.

In your own garden, you can go round every couple of days, or even every day! You will soon learn how long the flowers last, and how quickly or slowly they go through the process of going over. The weather makes a difference: heavy rain can literally bash the petals off, and soggy rain can make a flower look lank earlier than during fine weather.

The other question,  which one of my former Students asked, was "What's the difference between dead-heading and the pre-winter prune?"

A good question! The answer is, that if you have dead-headed "properly" all through the summer, you won't need to do much pruning in autumn, because you have been keeping the bush in shape. 

I am getting a weird feeling of deja vu as I write this, because I could've sworn I'd already covered it.... hang on...*checks blog*... oh yes, I covered it just last week, in an article on End of Season Pruning:  anyway, it is traditional to prune roses quite hard in autumn, to prepare them for the winter, and the core element of this practice is to prevent wind-rock. 

It's a bit like reefing your sails on a blustery day - by reducing the amount of above-ground growth on the rose bush (this applies to a lesser extent to climbing roses as well). it helps to avoid the plant being rocked by the wind, which loosens the roots and can cause all sorts of damage.

Right, there you have it, the basics of dead-heading the roses.

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