Your photos appear to be of a budded rose with a very long shank (trunk) planted pretty high. It seems the bud union is at the top of the single trunk, where the branches begin growing from the trunk. Personally, I wouldn't prune much from this plant. I would increase the water to it substantially to help compensate from the reflected heat it endures from that fence. Your soil appears rather dry. I'd think the plant's refusal to flower more would be due to lack of sufficient water. It seems to be receiving enough to keep it alive, but not enough to push it over the threshold to encourage it to flower.

You don't say what, if any, fertilizing you do, so that's difficult to make suggestions about. But I can imagine that spot is rather warm and appears rather dry. Try increasing the water quite a bit more than your micro sprinkler provides. Get out the hose and saturate the area, watering deeply once or twice a week and see how the plant responds.

Pruning anything off the plant isn't going to do anything to encourage it to flower if the main issue is lack of water. Good luck. Kim

OK, will increase the water. Thanks for the feedback.

In photobucket click and copy the "html" code instead of the "direct link" to have the photos appear in a gardenweb thread.

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Yes it does look really thirsty. Regular mulching with something like compost will enrich the soil over the long term with very little effort on your part. Mulch will also help keep the soil more moist.

OK thx for the tip on the photos. When January rolls around, should I do any pruning then?

If you are NorCal (your soil looks a lot like mine so I am going to guess Bay Area) then you should prune this back in later Oct early Nov. As with others I am going to go with a moderately light prune here. I would take off the 'branches' that are not going in the direction you want (mainly towards the fence) and possibly that lowest one.

I would suggest you ALSO need to start forcing that main 'trunk' to be more straight. Get a 3' piece of rebar from HD or Lowes and pound it in about 12" from the trunk then use some rope (with a piece of hose cut onto it where it touches the trunk to prevent chafing) to put some pull onto the trunk, not too much and AFTER you put a LOT of water on the rose to soften the soil up a bit.

Dig in a LOT of compost as that soil truly does look all clay and rock to me. You can do that now (esp when you do the tie back). I would not be too worried about growth over winter unless you KNOW you get frosts. Dig that compost in as well as you can, or skim a few inches off the soil and mix it with the compost in a wheelbarrow or something similar. If you really want to help it out, dig about 18" away from the trunk, carefully, using a small hand shovel and then put some compost in there as well. I would dig 12-18" deep if possible. I would then mulch the heck out of the thing to help with water retention.

I live in Calistoga and we can get sub freezing temps at night during the Jan-Mar months.

I will definitely add some compost and mulch. I was also thinking about tieing it back but figured it would be ok, with your suggestion I'll go ahead and do it now.

Thanks again for the help.

No prob. Yep Calistoga can hit you with frost. Have a 'wrap' ready for that. Roses really don;t like the cold.

You should also think about getting some grape pressings as mulch. Calistoga should have about a gazillion pounds of it that you can swipe some of!

I'd probably dig it out and bury it deeper if it were me - obviously when dormant. It looks prety gnarly too - if it were a rose that was replacable, I would have another, if not, I would propagate another and grow them together until I felt I could get rid of the old one. Roses don't usually mind being re-planted and sometimes gives them a boost. As others have said, it looks like it needs some sustenance.

I would wait on pruning if it's even close to being a rainy winter, because new emerging foliage is going to end up with miserable amounts of disease, which you will then have to cut off again (or it will all fall off). Keep your eye on the rainy season and prune when it looks to be mostly over. Best way to avoid most of the disease issues that way.

Also frost hurts new baby growth, but as to the rest of the plant, nearly all roses are perfectly happy down to the upper teens Fahrenheit, and some a lot colder than that.

No need to dig compost into the soil. Lay it on top as mulch and let earthworms pull it into the soil for you. Then repeat. And repeat. No earthworms, you say? Never seen a single one? Put down a layer of compost as mulch and they will magically appear.

Most of the canes are dark in color with only the thinner ones looking green. When I do eventually prune I'm not even sure where to start.

Your rose looks better than some I've seen. I agree with mulch and water and if the water runs away, build a ring of dirt to keep it near the rose. Fill the ring and hopefully it drains so you can refill it a few times in a day. Do this a few times a week. With more water and mulch, the rose will grow some new stems just above the single trunk and then when these are growing well you can trim away the older drier stems that aren't flowering as much as the new stems will. At that point, you can decide to shorten the new stems a little if you wish but for now I would just let it recover and build up food in the stems that it has.

Try digging very carefully around the base of the main trunk literally one handful at a time of soil and work your way out. Keep moving outwards, making sure that you don't cut thru roots but brush the soil off along them instead. Once you have some 'wobble' in the rose you can carefully dig deeper on the 'high side' and then 'reseat' the rose. Then before filling back in with your original dirt mixed with good organic matter, dig down a bit further in a ring as far out as you can manage and put tons of organic matter in. Then fill in around the rose... Then water the heck out of it and mulch around it.

Pruning for this season would be the lowest main I can see in photo3 that points a bit towards the fence. as well as the little stumpy stem next to it in same photo. After that just literally cut 1/2 of the height out from the rest of the plant (ie 1/2 of each cane coming from the main 'crown')as this pruning is really a 'recovery' not a shaping one. NEXT year you have to be more concerned with look, this year you just want it to get healthier. Its a bit drastic but I had to do that at the house we rent now. After 2 years of heavy pruning and shaping I have the rose I wanted blooming as high as the gutter line on the house! (yes on purpose)

hoovB, I would disagree with pruning this time of year in Calistoga. It will take out unwanted foliage which is just taking up nutrients right now. The buds that survive winter (and we don't know how wet it will get anyway) will be the strongest and those are the ones you want growing next season!

Personally, I would not prune anything green off this plant yet. As long as the wood and leaves are green, they are photosynthesizing food for the plant. That poor thing doesn't have all that much food production ability as it is. Increase the water. Feed it if you feel comfortable doing it. Definitely mulch and straighten the plant but leave all the green foliage and green canes alone until it's time to do your regular pruning. Not only are they generating food for the plant, all that foliage is providing sun block, shade for the canes, preventing them from potential sun scald. Once that isn't a potential issue, and you feel comfortable digging it up, go for it, but until the possibility of heat and sun damage is over for the summer and fall, I believe the plant is safer retaining all the green wood and foliage it can. Kim

I've added compost and have been watering nearly every day. When the temps drop I will look into replanting it deeper.

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Ah... I can almost hear it purring, in that cooler moist soil mulched with compost. :-) Whenever I see a neighbor's rose in dry unmulched soil, I imagine myself sneaking over in the middle of the night and covering the whole bed with compost, then mulch, LOL.

It looks a lot happier in this last picture! Don't be too surprised if you get a bloom or two from the TLC you're giving it now.

Looks better already! Hopefully this photo will upload, I put a red line on which stem you should prune off to help get some 'straight' back into it. Late oct-early Nov. Also make your water 'trough' circle wider (about 6"), you want the water going further out than you have it now. Don;t forget you want to feed it as well with a decent rose fert before winter sets in.

After adding some more compost to the soil I increased the size of the trough and poured some mulch. Here's a dumb question, do I put mulch in the water trough or around it?

I'm sure it won't hurt, just build up your trough with the mulch and don't lay it too thick on the inside so water can easily get through it, maybe an inch or so? Mom always did that with hers, keeps the roots cool and wet.

You can also find some type of ground cover to plant around it next season, or whenever you are done moving it around lol. Something that can handle being trimmed if necessary is and fast growing, but won't take all the food from the rose. There's this stuff here in Indiana that's got little yellow flowers and creeps over the ground, grows like a weed just about anywhere and can take over if you're not careful, really resistant to both wet and dry weather and can handle hard freezes and blaring sun with no worries; we put it in all of our empty-looking flower beds that have big, tall plants but it chokes out smaller things like hyacinth (don't know if I spelled that right... oops). After a quick Google search I found the name of it, Czar's Gold Sedum. The link is a place to buy it and the only one I could find that looks like ours, not sure if it will grow well where you're at but hopefully it will help give you a place to start looking if you want to give something like it a try. :3

Here is a link that might be useful: Czars Gold Sedum, takes a bit of scrolling down to find it

This post was edited by SasorisPuppet on Fri, Apr 11, 14 at 11:15