Congrat, NewGirl.
Can this "one cane wonder" be a standard? Just wondering.

Yeah, you can sometimes rejuvenate an elderly gnarly rose. The most drastic (and risky) method is the single hard pruning - this can have astonishing results in a rose which possesses innate vigour.....but weedier specimens can easily give up the ghost. A much kinder method is to encourage newer basal canes to grow from as near to the crown as possible. You can interrupt the upward flow of sap by semi-girdling the main cane - make a shallow incision halfway round the cane, just through the thin cambium layer. Combined with a good hit of water and a general organic fertiliser, the rose can trigger previously moribund bud eyes into growth.
Finally, you could accept the legginess of the plant by accentuating the single trunk and treating the bush like a specimen tree. Any canes which grow higher up the shrub can be bent to a horizontal when the young growth is at its most flexible while lower canes can be 'limbed up' much as you would raise the crown of a tree. A good pruning regime over the next 3 years can reshape an aged plant into dramatic and interesting bushes.

I hadn't even thought of making it a standard. That'd be fun! I'll see what I can do with the Shot Silk since it's a strong grower. Not immediately of course, but later in the summer I'll see what it's doing. The other one- well, I'll be happy if it just stays alive.

In my experience, the answer is "sometimes". I inherited a mystery rose when we bought our house that's a highly scented stingy blooming but gorgeous HT that I call Mr. Lincoln until I find out otherwise. It was absolutely a one-cane wonder, with maybe two blooms a year. I hadn't given it much care since I didn't plant it or know what it was, but after it sailed through the Easter freeze a few years back I decided it was worth some rehab.

My solution was a relatively gentle approach - I watered it deliberately in dry spells as campanula describes, and gave it a good dose of alfalfa early in the season and mid-season. I've heard alfalfa helps to encourage basal breaks, which are those new branches starting from the base that would redeem it from being a one-cane wonder. In this rose, it actually put out two or three canes within the first year after treatment, and it's now a three-cane wonder. Still stingy blooms, but at least I get a "flush" of five or six blooms two or three times a year, and it doesn't look so gawky in between times. Now I can also feel better about a hard prune on the oldest tall cane without feeling like I'm jeopardizing the only blooming cane it has.

Bottom line is that some of this depends on the rose - some roses seem to be prone to being one-cane wonders, but you can stretch them a bit beyond that boundary with some TLC. They'll probably never be very full bushes, but the extra water and alfalfa sure can't hurt anything

Cynthia

I hadn't heard of using alfalfa- that sounds much less "dangerous" than the scraping methods some have described. I'm sure they work- but I'm not that brave.

There's new growth on both of them today. I figure I'll just have to be patient and if it doesn't work out be grateful for the happy plants I do have.

Thank you wanttogarden, Campanula and Nippstress!!

I have a Neptune from last season that ended up being a one cane wonder. Oddly my neighbor gave me hers, also a one cane wonder. (Seems both had a busy borer-but don't see much evidence of them in the other roses so I have to wonder if we got them that way or if Neptune is just a happy host for them)

Because both roses are new and I have cut out the damaged canes, I am hoping they become happy multi cane wonders this year.