Mike, some recommend it for us here in SoCal, where roses really don't go dormant.
I'm not sure whether or not it helps, but those leaves really have to go anyhow, so it can't hurt.

OTOH, we must have had 100 mph wind gusts here, while I was away in TX.
Not only are many of the roses darned near leafless, but the wind ripped most of the leaves off of an avocado tree.
A half-nekkid avocado tree is a very strange sight.

Jeri

Yep, I stripped them-- all except the hardy shrub Golden Wings and the rugosa hedges. I think it made a real difference-- out of 200+ roses I only lost a couple over the course of 10 years! And this was in a part of Ohio without reliable snow cover. I hasten to add I also winter-protected very elaborately as most members of my rose society were losing 10 or 20 plants every year. My budget wouldn't allow for that!!

Mike I use to strip the roses when I had a few,
but I'll would be a darn fool stripping 100 roses.
That just too much work in cool weather.
Niecey

I doubt-- actually I totally disbelieve-- that stripping leaves induces dormancy. In warm climates it would make the plants work harder to refoliate, which they would start doing immediately. If it is too cold to grow, then it would make little or no difference, but I would tend to let the rose decide when to drop its leaves. If there is a lot of disease, it could be helpful to strip the diseased foliage before it drops.

Frankly this may be magical thinking-- symbolically imitating the process you wish you could actually make happen. But only cold weather can cause dormancy.

Mike, I strip the leaves about 12" up from the ground, so they won't encourage disease under the foot high winter mulch. The rest eventually blows away in the winter wind, and/or is pruned off come spring anyway.

I have used dormant strength Lime Sulphur before the spring growth to force leaf death so the roses would drop their old leaves which they would otherwise hang onto into spring.
In my garden, the centifolias, gallicas and damasks do drop their leaves for winter. Many other roses don't drop them at all (and R. laevigata and kin just grow more in winter than in summer). The rest don't. And I agree with MichaelG, perhaps because our growing conditions are similar, though his are a bit colder.

The times I've stripped rose leaves are when summer fungal problems get onto a rose that shouldn't have them. An example: Traviata is exceptionally healthy but had as a neighbor Europeana which tended to fungal problems. When Europeana spread and started contacting Traviata, Traviata's formerly pristine leaves got spotty. So I took off the Traviata leaves in harms way and moved Europeana. And Traviata went back to being spotless.

In colder zones I think it is better to let the leaves be until they fall naturally. The energy from the photosynthesis is stored in the leaves and the substances from the leaves are absorbed to the canes before they let go of the leaves. A lot of the new growth comes from this energy stored in the canes in the spring (One of the reasons I wait to reduce the sizes of my rosebushes until they have lost their leaves or before a heavy snowfall ..not pruning, I wait for that until spring, but just reducing some of the long canes so they won´t break
under the weight of snow/Ice storms). Some roses cling more to their leaves than others; Madame Isaac Pereire and Constance Spry only looses about half their leaves before the spring when they finally let go of them when the new growth begins. The only leaves I remove now (If they don't fall of by themselves), are those that I can see have spot/fungal diseases. I want as few fungal spores as possible to survive. It is common sense and good garden hygiene to do this, and may help reduce spraying next season.

I attended a seminar given by Monty of Monty's Joy Juice fame. He stated he dug up and shook the soil from the roots to induce dormancy. Doing this removes the feeder roots as the soil falls away and the process forces dormancy. Seems to be a better way and probably takes about the same amount of time as stripping leaves.
It would seem to me that stripping leaves would promote growth as the bush works to replace them. If new leaves did not grow it would indicate the bush was already dormant and removing the leaves was not necessary.
We do enough unnecessary things to our roses in an attempt to improve on Mother Nature or prompt thing to occur at our convenience.
Like sh*t, dormancy happens, and it does when nature indicates it's time.
Relax and enjoy!
BTW, digging up the bushes and shaking the soil off the roots to promote dormancy seems a little extreme unless you're harvesting to store.

Thanks for the replies everyone. We had a very hard frost last night. One or to more like that, and I won't have to worry about it anyway.

Mike

Too many roses - now I rely on winter and dormant spray.

Although if there is leaf crud I'm suspicious of, I'll strip those leaves. There was some black crud on Larry Daniels - I stripped the leaves off, the canes were clean and green, so I quit worrying.

Ususally a couple of dormant sprays gets most of them near to leafless. Some of them shed only part of their leaves during the winter, dump the rest with the new growth in spring.

I cannot even imagine how digging up a rose and disturbing its roots could possibly be good for it.

Sandy

I'm intrigued by these concerns about roses regrowing leaves in mid-November in..... Wisconsin? I'm in Zone 9b in NorCal and the only roses that regrow winter leaves after stripping are the totally evergreen roses - - the hybrid giganteas. Nothing else regrows leaves. Oh, well, another group of roses that won't slow down are the ones just planted this year that are in mega-growth mode. I guess their grow-at-all-costs signals overwhelm their photo-periodicy signals.

Here it's always a leap of faith from the October flush to the December deep freeze. I have a number of roses producing new basals, and that's without the benefit of any fertilizer other than a spare tablespoon of calcium nitrate in early March 2007. Fifteen degrees in December is what roses are made for. I'm only worried about one subtropical species rose.

The old way of growing roses had everyone stripping to induce dormancy. But, you can't make a rose do what its genes are telling it to not do, any more than you can make a rose not do what its genes are telling it to do. If they're going to go dormant, they don't need our help. Personally I don't think repeat blooming roses go dormant at all, whether you strip the leaves or not.

I wait til late winter or spring to strip off whatever's still on, to reduce disease transmission only. Repeat-blooming rose leaves are still green and photosynthesizing here until late winter anyway. Once bloomers are true deciduous shrubs and go dormant and drop leaves on their own.

If you're covering the roses for winter I guess you'd want to strip off the leaves first, to reduce disease transmission.

The deer have stripped the leaves off of mine and didn't eat the stems. Kind of helpful, actually. It's such a warm La Nina winter that I wouldn't be suprised to see bud break. The lilacs are budding out, and I have a reblooming iris unfurling a new flower! Strange weather for Colorado.

Cheers,
Michelle

This topic comes up from time to time. So I have observed what happens to the leaves that stay on the bush through the winter. In my garden, most fall off in the spring right before the new growth spurt starts. I can't imagine many leaves staying on through the winter in WI.

Sandy808
Monty has a very successful rose care business and contracts with many to care for their roses.
I can't say I agree with his methods but I also can't argue with his success.
Harvesting roses puts them in dormancy, cold storage keeps them there. In cold growing zones removing a rose would do the same thing. I've often revitalized a rose bush by digging it up, soaking it, and replanting. It's just like planting a new bare root.
I'm not condoning the method, just reporting on it.