Hi Kendra, copy the html in the first box under "Grab Your Code" on the tinypic website to post the photo here directly. It makes it a lot easier to get comments that way. What grows from the buds: 1. leaves 2. small twigs that have a flower or two at the end, and a leaf or two. 3. larger branches that have a cluster of flowers and a few leaves 4. Huge stems that rival the size of the original stem. Whether 1,2,3, or 4 are what you get from each bud depends on a lot of different factors, the cultivar, the location of the plant in your yard, the climate zone, the amount of water and nutrients the plant gets, the location on the cane where the bud resides. The easiest thing to do is what you have already started: take photos after pruning, and see what happens. Did you get a great spring flush from your rose, or one that was worse that last year? Are the canes dying back from where you cut, or sprouting strong new growth? The small twiggy growth you left--is that producing some flowers, or nothing? Observing what happens tells you how to prune next year. Write things down, and every year, the rose will get better and better based on your knowledge. It's not a cut-and-dried thing because there are so many variables. The basics are: removed dead, damaged, and diseased wood, keep it a managable size so you can handle it without injuring your self. A trick I use is taking a long pole pruner to reach the highest growth. I grab it and pull it down and either trim it or arch it over so I can reach it later. Climbing rose care is an art, not a science. Check YouTube, there are some good "how to prune a climbing rose" videos on there.

Wow, thank you for all your suggestions. I'm thinking it must be a box or privet honeysuckle. My plan is to cut it down to about a foot (as someone indicated above). Over the years, as it grew, the owners just trimmed the side of the shrub so that it wouldn't block the path on the side of the house. So it just grew higher and higher and now has started leaning over the path. So now it's just an annoyance and gets beat up on by anyone walking down the path. Knowing what it is I can now get it healthy and healthy-looking again. Thank you again! Your efforts are much appreciated. flora uk: there are some red leaves on top that have fallen from a nearby japanese maple, but it's all just the honeysuckle in the photo.

kaylah, on the pink one nice to see you're still around, remember you well. Yes, I am in Iowa. Yes, yours does definitely resemble mine; I think mine could go to ten feet, appears to be a climber. It's even hard to make a rebar tripod for it because it's spread around funny from suckering. Did you stake yours and does it sucker? roselvr, I did some more work in Photoshop and threw an html page together using a simple style I use often for a template, you can get to it at the useful link, hope it proves useful :-) Let me know if you want to see magnified detail anywhere else. Those are every single photo I took of that rose that day, May 24, 2007, or ever. It may take a bit to load because I have about 11 photos in there, one of which is a fairly large 100% crop but not the whole photo, that would be way too big. It loaded pretty fast for me considering. anntn6b, When it comes to cutting these back, do you know yet if you can count on blooms all along the mature stems next year IF you leave them to mature over summer? No I don't know at all what is likely to happen if I cut it back, may be unhappy with the results. I thought about the two canes hanging over the sidewalk last night and figured maybe I could train them with stakes laterally, would rather not do that and would rather not dodge them getting to the garage, especially in winter when ice back there makes it treacherous. I'm afraid to cut that tallest one down as I have no idea what would happen after, but I'd miss that one the least. I'd be ok with it if it didn't have that naked cane to look at. Do you think I should wait until fall or just let it go for another year? There will be plenty of cuttings from some place left to propagate another one, and I don't know if it is done suckering or not. I would not be surprised if that thing travels underneath the narrow sidewalk and shows up on the other side, going toward the east sun! Thanks all for the input. I hope I put all this together right. Here is a link that might be useful: HTML page of all my unknown white rose photos

Need a closer pic. It could be a lilac, sometimes they don't bloom because of one reason or another, for example, if they are pruned at the wrong time, they won't bloom.