I wouldn't want to deal with mine on a pillar. It wants to grow wide with lots of thorny canes and some suckering. Mine are free standing and must be ten feet wide. You could probably put it on an arch. Still I wouldn't care to. It's a monster.

Mine is virtually thornless, with lots of flexible canes. (Helpmefind also says it's thornless--medoncino_rose, could you have the wrong plant?) I've never tried a pillar, but my plant seems like one that it wouldn't hurt to try.

It can be done. One of the 'classic' Madame Plantier photographs is of is grown as an humongous, very flat, climber on a house in England. However, I've also heard that training that particular rose takes trained gardeners (yes, plural) several days straight.

On the plus side, it is nearly thornless and doesn't sucker. I can make the no-suckering statement because *everything* suckers here, except the roses that really don't. I wish this one did since it hasn't done at all well since the groundhogs decided it would make a good house roof.

The minus side is that it does want to be a fairly large plant, and blooms on old wood. So continual hacking to keep it in bounds is going to reduce its flowering. So growing it on a fairly large arch sounds much more doable to me than growing it on a tripod, which sounds less doable than espaliering it against a house wall.

Thank you all. I love all the helpful feedback. I'm so new at this, and have been waiting several years of construction to be able to plant these things and can now focus some effort into the outside of my house. But now that I've started seeing what mature antique roses look like (I also went last year to Vintage open gardens), I realize my yard is a bit too narrow for all the roses I love, and I have to change my plans just a little. If I can go vertical, all the better.

I've pruned our Madame Plantier into a compact shrub--right now she is 4 ft high and 3 ft wide--about a month before she blooms. The floppy mess didn't work in our climate--it would rain and the blooms would look terrible--covered with splashed mud from the rain. I'm sure the tree root competition, poor soil, and moderate sunlight keep her small, but she blooms just fine every year.

I wonder if my rose is mis-labled.

I think yours is probably mislabeled Mendocino. I went out to specifically check for thorns on my plant, which is blooming now, and saw a few, non-obtrusive ones, but only down low on the plant. You could cut a bucket of flowers and not find a thorn anywhere near a flower (and actually, I did, and it won in the OGR bouquet category at last week's Cal Coastal Rose Soc. show in Carlsbad).

I would think this rose would be easy to train if only you have a big enough space to start with and you kept after it -- the new canes are prolific and are mostly from the base of the plant and very lax. It would be nice flattened along a fence, but I don't think these canes would be long enough to go over the top of an arch. Mine is about 6 feet tall by 5 feet wide and is in a place where it hides an old tool shed from the rest of the yard, and it does an admirable job of that -- so I just let it sprawl there.

Mine is nearly thornless. The canes are thin and easily bent to a form. I have it up one side and over the top of an arch. I prune it after flowering just enough to keep it from bothering it's neighbors. There is a large flower Clematis running up and through the rose too. It's 5 years old and took a while to establish because of shading by a monster "Sweet Autumn Clematis" which was moved 2 years ago. Now there is a great flush of bloom.

Mme. Plantier is a monstrous (and gorgeous) rose! I'm sure she can be trained...new canes are very pliable.

Mine suckers profusely though, I know you're getting mixed comments on this, so maybe assume that it "might" for you?

~Anika

Here is a link that might be useful: gothiclibrarian.net

I went out to look at my rose carefully and was suprised to see that indeed it was thornless. I'd gotten so scratched up working behind it, but it must have been canes of other roses running through. This plant is 12 years old. It has suckered. There are canes four feet away from the original base. It really is a massive mountain. I imagine though it might be kept in check. Looking at mine it's hard to imagine.