Wow ! A lot of questions in one post ...

From my own experience, I have found that not all roses need to be pruned every year. Yes pruning often encourages new growth, but in a colder zone you can wait longer. For me, my summer temps are quite hot, so my ultimate goal is to stop any kind of rejuvenation pruning early enough for the rose to put on foliage. Of course, it is never too late, in my opinion, to remove the dead or diseased canes. Since I have over 100 roses, I only take a few of the worst offenders down each year and do a "clean prune" on the others, if I prune them at all.

If you feel it is too late, I honestly suggest disbudding your roses because I have found that when I disbud my roses to eliminate the curculios from breeding in my garden, all of the roses push out more foliage and more buds. This practice allows the rose to put more energy into plant and root growth. I think I end up with a more solid plant.

btw .. I think Deersteve is in a milder year-round climate than yours, so his garden practices are not necessarily transferable.

Roses are so efficient. Often when it's warmer, they will start to leaf out and then it will get cold and they stall. Roses have extra bud eyes and will often leaf out again at the same spot when it gets warmer.

I too, keep most of the growth as possible. The plant needs the foliage for photosynthesis. If you cut it off, it just takes longer to feed itself.

In my cold weather, I always have at least one winter thaw that stimulates the roses to produce blind growth. I just ignore it. My point of the view is that the rose will abandon the blind growth when it no longer needs the leaves. This has proven true in this garden for several year and for several different classes of roses.

I've turned 3 one-cane wonders into viable plants by disbudding them for one whole season. I gave them the TLC of good feeding and watering for that one year. They came back pushing new basals and new growth and are now wonderful plants. Double Delight can be tricky. If it is sited well, then the rejuvenation pruning of removing one or two canes at the base every year seems to stimulate the plant to put out new basals and to be a stronger plant.

As for Ruby Ruby, yeah you can take it down hard, but make sure you have it in a container that suits the size of the rose and gives it some room to grow. Most minis are own root and can come back from a harder prune. However, if you get serious heat before it has developed good foliage, you might want to place the container where it gets more shade.

Good luck with your roses.

Smiles,
Lyn

Thank you Lyn!

I know, I have the ability to pack my posts with tons of questions.... but that is because I have so many of them!! If I didn't I'd have a trillion threads and everyone would stop reading the board! Wish I had as many blooms as I do questions! Lol!

I am going to review all your good info and apply it as best I can.

Deersteve is in a milder climate, so I was trying to weigh the "late prune" against longer growing season in my head with not much luck.

I'm going to go outside and take a look around and try to make some decisions. That is the problem... too many decisions and not enough know-how. That, and you can't glue the canes back! LOL!

Thank you so much for your time, I do appreciate it! You always post so much good info.

Have you checked for winter damage? Snip off bits and see if the center pith is white, as it should be, or brownish. If temperatures fell to around 5 degrees (depending on the context), younger canes can be injured. Also inspect the canes lower down for canker and mechanical damage.

I am 7a and my roses are starting to bloom, but maybe you are in the PNW where winters are longer.

You may be seeing apical dominance--if the bud eyes are below vigorous new growth, they may remain dormant--so an older cane will just sit there, as none of its bud eyes are high enough to get started. How pronounced this is depends on the variety. Some varieties will eventually show growth on all canes. With others, the dormant canes will actually die.

michaelg, I am the philadelphia area. I have blooms ready to open on a few bushes, none or a few developing on others.

I think I had some late winter damage, actually, and have been trimming as I see evidence of this. I've tried to go only as far as needed, but we have swung back and forth as far as temps. last night was a frost warning for some pockets, actually. I had lots of plump budeyes prior to some of these late cold snaps, now many seem brown.

I have one cutting that overwintered last year well, though small. This year, she looked very green and had some bud swelling, but now looks to be dying back at least on one of her two or three tips. I cut her back a bit, but she has not put out a single leaf and many of the swellings seem brown. Her couple canes seem green, though, so perhaps she is just waiting for a bit more warmth.

zack_lau, I will have to do some reading about this. This may be what I am seeing on some of the plants that i did not trim much last year. Thanks you for the info!

Frozen growth buds are normal here in spring. While annoying, they don't count as winter damage. For that, you need to check the color of center pith in the stems. Sometimes just the smaller stems are injured, sometimes the younger canes as well, sometimes everything, sometimes (with the mild winters we've been having) nothing.

In answer to your original post, it's never too late to prune. In colder zones like mine, I routinely do passes checking the roses for winter damage that I couldn't detect earlier in the spring. I'll have plenty of rose canes that start leafing out then shrivel the leaves and start looking dry. When I check further down on the cane, I can usually find a canker spot or split cane or some other damage that is affecting growth further up the cane. The original rose cane had enough energy stored up to leaf out briefly, but those kinds of canes are toast. They need to be pruned out any time in the year they occur, to avoid having the damage spread canker further down the plant.

As Michael and Zach said, check for damage and "clean" pith first. If you don't see damage and the leaves are just nipped back by a late cold spell, there's no harm in leaving them for a while, but it's worth checking that rose periodically to see if there's some gradual cane die-back that hadn't been evident at first. I tend to err on the side of more pruning rather than less, since undetected winter damage will stunt a rose's growth much more than a hard spring pruning, particularly for well-established plants.

Cynthia

Good suggestions from Cynthia (nippstress), who is a very sharp, well-informed poster.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I am going to do my best to take all these suggestions to heart!

Nippstress, I do think I am seeing some late damage and will look down the canes to see what I see.

Thank you all again!

I have several that are doing the same thing. Some canes have leafed out beautifully and others that are perfectly green and healthy have nothing, or just a few stunted looking leaves. I have no idea why they're doing that but I'm assuming it's weather related at this point. I've left the green canes alone for now (it really is still very early in the season) and will see if they decide to leaf out when the weather finally gets warm...and stays warm. If they don't leaf out then I'll probably prune them back. I don't think it's ever too late to prune if they need it.

Two times in which is IS too late to prune.

The plant has just given you a display of flowers and you now want to do a drastic renewal pruning--the plant is exhausted and won't bounce back vigorously--instead, it will sulk for the rest of the season.

Late in the season when it is too late for new growth to survive winter.

Ah, thanks Zack for correcting my overstatement at the beginning of my response! Particularly in cold zones, we need to ignore the standard rose myth of pruning everything down to 3" stubs in the fall. Can't think of a better way to discourage even established HTs from surviving our winters. All the more reason we need the collected wisdom of GardenWeb, and thank you immensely Michael for including me among the Wise Ones. I remain grateful for everything I continue to learn from this site.

If I may piggyback a related question onto the OP's post, I'm curious what the process is when a rose that has died to the ground puts up some leaves briefly in spring then dies, never to be seen again. When this happens on an established cane, the rose is using stored energy in the canes, but I'm talking about roses that have no visible canes whatsoever and the leaves are coming straight from the top of the root bundle on a micro-cane stub (on own-root plants). I suppose the same principle applies that it's using stored energy then fading, but since the roots are the powerhouse of the plant it seems that if they survived the winter to be root hardy they should continue to support putting out further leaves. The roots don't canker, do they? What kills these admittedly weak plants that had the strength to survive one winter and leaf out a little?

Just curious - I can't think of anything that would save these wimpy survivors at that point, but it's frustrating to celebrate - "Ah, good - Fantastique has finally survived" only to realize it hasn't.

Cynthia

It has been a decade since I've seen that effect in our yard--from exposed bud unions due to bad planting advice on plant labels! Hasn't happened since I started burying the bud unions. One might deduce some sort of graft failure. We only saw that effect we we had two dozen roses--we have now had 200 for years...

I had this happen with one of my roses this year. I had planted two Climbing Pinata side by side. Both seemed to take off as well as body bags could over their first year.

The grafts on both were buried. It is grafted on Dr. Huey.

Last fall, the Manic Mower pushed his god awful Rolling leaf blower into one, breaking it's small canes off, basically to the ground.

This year, that plant did begin to send up a new shoot from the graft at the same time as the other Pinata, so I was glad that it seemed to have survived both the winter and the accident. After a couple weeks, it just simply died away.

I have dug around the graft a bit and do see that the cane it was attached to is still green at the bottom, ground level and lower. Everything else is brown, but could just be the graft bark I am seeing. I am sure I was not seeing a rootstock sucker, as I did inspect it and saw it was originating from the graft/green cane, not below.

I also thought that root growth would see it through, as in never had too much top growth last year, but did show promise. I was thrilled that it sprouted this season, then bummed to see it disappear.

Is it dead? Who knows. Green tells me no, but there is so little of it that it could just well be a goner.
I have been debating on digging it out and putting it in a pot to see if it can be saved, but perhaps leaving it there to see if it decides to do something later is the better option.
The one next to it did shoot up what seem to be two new basals, which are growing well.

My Memorial Day struggled for two years and died back to the bottom mid season each year except for one or two tiny canes. The graft was also buried. This I am sure was lack of sun. I was sure she was a goner but this year she shot new growth. Not tall , but growth. I dug her up to discover NO roots aside from what looked to be exactly what she started with when I got her as a grafted bare root. I put her in a pot and then in the ground in a better spot. Though small, only about 8 inches from the ground, her new growth is still healthy, leafy and green. She has not done much, but has not died. :) I have hope she is growing roots again and has just enough top growth to keep her going. As noted on another thread, I think I'll remove her buds this year in the hopes she can recover. That will be hard, the flowers she gave, though few, were beautiful.

Cynthia, I took a look at Fantastique on HMF⦠I'd be bummed to have lost her, too.