Second only to first bloom in the spring, when all your roses flower at the same glorious time, fall bloom is truly spectacular. If you’ve deadheaded your everblooming roses religiously all summer, cutting those nice long stems that encourage big new flowers, you’ll be thrilled with the color, size, and substance of your fall roses.

When the weather is cooler, rose buds spend more time growing before they open, so they’re huge! Warm days and cool nights allow the flowers to form more perfectly, so you’ll see more blooms with that most desirable classic spiral center. The petals will be thicker and more substantive, and best of all, the colors more vibrant. Fall weather brings out the very best color of the entire season.  

In cold climates, even though your roses may continue to bloom well into October, the September roses will be last of the really pretty ones, so cut them and bring them inside to enjoy, give them away, or just love them in the garden. Warm climate rosarians may still have roses at Christmastime, so it’s important for you to continue fertilizing and spraying to keep your plants pest free.

Cooler weather in late summer and early fall can tempt blackspot when there’s dew on the foliage all night, so keep up with your regular fungicide sprays until after Indian summer. You may even want to increase the dose or spray more frequently to keep blackspot from defoliating your roses. It’s very important to keep the plants healthy at this time of year, as the leaves are the factory where photosynthesis works to make the energy that keeps roses alive through the long winter ahead. Plants that are naked going into the fall will have a difficult time surviving winter.

Early September is also the time when cold-climate rosarians should stop fertilizing their roses, and allow them to begin their slow transition into dormancy. In all climates, the general rule is to stop applying growth fertilizers a month before the first frost is expected in your USDA Hardiness Zone. Do, however, consider a late-season fertilizer with less nitrogen, no phosphorus, but lots of potassium, which aids roses in becoming dormant and staying dormant through those very damaging winter freeze/thaw cycles. Rosarians in warm climates have to force their roses into dormancy in winter so the plants can rest and regain their energy for the next blooming season. Therefore, your late-season fertilizer should be applied beginning a couple of months before you do your spring pruning.

Once you’ve enjoyed the lovely early fall bloom, and cut all the blooms you want to enjoy in the vase, stop deadheading and allow rose hips to form on the plants. When hips form, the plants begin their dormancy process. This of course, is one of the reasons it’s important to deadhead promptly during the summer! It may be easier to look at it from the other direction; any kind of pruning on roses encourages the sap to run and new growth to start. In the fall, we want the sap to thicken and stop running so we don’t prune or deadhead. That’s not to say you shouldn’t cut a lovely rose any time you want, after all, that’s what you’re growing them for! But keep cutting to a minimum after the first frost.

It’s early to start thinking about the new roses you want to plant next spring, but this one will be sold right out from under you if you don’t reserve a plant now at your garden center or mail-order source. Oprah Winfrey’s new hybrid tea, Legends, will be introduced for the 2010 season. But a few plants will be available in the spring of 2009. 

Legends is an absolutely humungous ruby-red hybrid tea. It doesn’t have that classic spiral petal arrangement that I think is vital in a hybrid tea, but the color is so striking, and the flower so gigantic, and the vase life so long, a week at least, even without air conditioning, and the open bloom so spectacular, that Legends has captivated my (somewhat jaded) rose soul! I’m growing a test plant in my garden. I didn’t expect much because I already grow big roses, and I like my hybrid teas to have great form. But I have cut the most incredible blooms this season! They sit in their vase and just get bigger and more beautiful. Legends won’t ever win the Queen of the Show award for the best perfectly formed hybrid tea, but it will take the Open Bloom class every time!