by Ann Hooper

June is National Rose Month!

It doesn’t matter whether you prefer to enjoy your roses on the plants where their season-long bloom keeps the garden colorful between the cycles of the spring, summer, and fall perennials, or if you like to cut your roses for arranging or giving away. In either case, those blooms will eventually have to come off the plants. Cutting flowers when the blooms are fresh, or deadheading the spent blooms amounts to the same thing—pruning. 

Summer pruning encourages the plants to keep growing strongly and to produce the next round of flowers more quickly. And done properly, this pruning ensures that the new stems and flowers will be big and sturdy. Here’s how it works: Modern ever blooming roses produce flowers from two types of canes: the basal canes that grow from the bud union or from the crown of the plant; and secondary canes, which are new canes that grow from old canes.

Basal canes are the future of your rosebush, and your plant should produce several new ones each season. Basal canes can grow from the base of the plant at any time, but it’s most common to see them in early spring and in late summer. In cold climates, where the bud union is below the level of the soil, the new basal canes will appear to be coming up out of the ground. Cherish them! Basal canes should be large in diameter, or fat, as I like to say.  And like all rose canes, they’ll be fatter at the bottom than they are at the top where the flower is. A brand new basal cane will produce leaves along most of its length, and just one flower or cluster of flowers at the top. But that’s just the beginning of what that cane will do!

When you cut that flower or flower cluster-- whether it’s a fresh flower or a spent bloom-- from the top of a new basal cane, another new cane, called a secondary cane, or a stem, will sprout from the spot where you made the cut. That new secondary cane will probably never be as fat as the cane it’s growing from. So if you cut off the flower near the top of the basal cane, where it’s smaller in diameter the new secondary cane that grows from that spot will be even thinner. In fact, it may be so thin that it won’t be strong enough to support the new flower that will grow at the top.

The solution, of course, is to cut a long stem on the flower, making the cut lower down, where the basal cane is thicker. To figure out how low to cut, remember that the new secondary cane will be only slightly smaller than the spot on the basal cane that it grows from, so you may not have to (and shouldn’t) cut off more than half of the basal cane.

Cut about a quarter-inch above an outward-facing 5-leaf leaflet. The new secondary cane will sprout from that leaf axil. New secondary canes may also sprout from other leaf axils lower down on the basal cane. It’s a good thing. Each new secondary cane will grow tall, with leaves along its length, and it will have a new flower at the top.

But don’t stop yet. There are still more flowers to come! Once the secondary canes have bloomed, you’ll want to deadhead them, too, so new tertiary canes—with more flowers—can grow. The same rule applies. The new tertiary cane will be smaller than the secondary cane, so you’ll want to cut almost all of the secondary cane off when you cut the flower or deadhead. Cut just above the lowest leaf axil on the secondary cane. A fat new tertiary cane will sprout from that leaf axil. Et cetera, et cetera, all season long!

Let’s remember for a minute that original basal cane that was new this year, and why it’s the future of your rosebush. When you do your early spring pruning next year, in 2009, you’ll prune that basal cane back to four to eight inches. New secondary canes will grow from it again, providing lots of flowers for next season. And new basal canes will sprout from the base of the plant, too, which you’ll treat the same way you did this year’s basal canes. A rose plant may not be forever, but well pruned, it’s pretty close!

Ann Hooper is a certified American Rose Society Consulting Rosarian, who grows nearly 400 rosebushes at her home near Boston. She is the owner of Primary Products, a mail-order supplier of everything needed to grow fabulous roses. Visit the Primary Products website at www.primaryproducts.com. Ann will always answer your rose culture questions.  E-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .