Would cutting them back further make them shorter later in the season than leaving them taller now will? Yes, but... you don't want to make them too short at any one point lest they are weakened. A rose stores most of its energy in the canes, not the roots. So when you cut off a lot of cane you are reducing valuable stored energy. It doesn't matter as much when the rose is well established, but on small, young, or very stressed plants hard pruning can set them back a lot. What I do when I need to control size, but don't want to take the risk of weakening them, is to prune them moderately at the start of the year, but then deadhead harder after each flush of bloom, as required to control size. Instead of taking off 6"-12" when deadheading, if the rose is getting too large I take off 24"-36" (this would be on a 6'-8' plant). This does sometimes delay the next flush a little, but the garden looks way way better at the end of the season. A 12' hybrid tea means I can't see the flowers unless I climb the roof. I'm not the roof-climber I used to be. If I don't want to delay the next flush for some reason, I'll just do the 6" method, then take off a little extra after the subsequent round of deadheading. Belinda's Dream is a unique case. This rose is unusual in that it is a cross of an old once-blooming rambling rose with the classic hybrid tea, 'Tiffany'. BD has a growth habit that reflects this--a tendency to go sideways at times, and branch oddly. I shape it lightly or moderately at the beginning of the year and then take off what I need to during the growing season to keep it at a reasonable size. It will get very large if you let it.

Hi Andrea, you're going to find almost as many "theologies" about planting depth as you will pruning, fertilizing, spraying, disbudding, you name it! Mine is as follows: "1) It discourages rootstock suckers." If they say so. I have very seldom had ANY issues with root stock suckers unless there has been damage done to the feeder roots of the plant. Digging around too close to an established bush will break roots which often throw new top growth. Gophers gnawing through roots have caused the same. "Gardeners" who 'cultivate' rose beds CAUSE forests of Dr. Huey as well as encourage gall. Frequent, too-shallow watering also encourages all roots to move to the surface where you are much more likely to experience sucking from stocks and varieties alike. I haven't noticed buried bud unions "discouraging" suckers. I have experienced Lavender Pinocchio (awful, weak plant to begin with, even budded) getting buried, going own root and dying, leaving Dr. Huey growing beautifully around the dead own root plant. I don't buy # 1 based upon my three-plus decades of growing MANY roses in this climate. As long as the stock is properly prepared; the scion is vigorous and growing well; no one "cultivates" around the bushes, damaging feeder roots to stimulate sucker growth; shovels remain out of the rose bed, preventing root damage from their use; gophers aren't an issue in the beds, causing root damage and encouraging stock suckering; water is applied properly so it flushes deeply through the soil instead of remaining too shallow so the roots grow TO the surface when suckers are more likely to occur, stock suckers have not been an real issue for me. "2) It encourages grafted roses to form their own roots, which, in the long run, increase the plant's viability." Really? That will depend upon many variables. MANY roses we've discussed on these forums are dawgs own root. Those should first be removed from their blanket statement of benefit. Add those which sucker madly. Do you want a rose to sucker all over your rose beds and lawn? Perhaps those types which you may have specifically obtained budded should also be removed? How about those whose genetics are simply not suitable for you soil and water types? Multiflora genes come to mind. They don't mix well with my soil and water, but put them on Huey roots and they don't become and remain albino due to chlorosis. I will agree that it MIGHT encourage some roses to form their own roots. The second part is a large, "it all depends". They presume all roses are good own root, in all places, which, as we have seen, is not true. "3) Roses seem to put out more canes when the graft is buried." Oh, for a time machine! Perhaps in the warmer nursery cans of rich soil compared to the cold, damp ground at Berkeley Hort. Nursery. I've been there and it is a gorgeous, interesting and fun nursery. I would LOVE to be able to snatch that person, drag them back in time to that Newhall canyon and SHOW them how in this climate and soil, what they advise resulted in one and two cane wonders which refused to produce new basals. Uncover the bud unions and magically, new basals! "4) It looks more natural and aesthetically pleasing to have several canes coming out of the ground than to have a dried-out looking graft bulge above the soil's surface." That is a statement of personal preference and not a horticultural benefit. "Roses grown on their own roots should be planted at the same level they are in their nursery container." Why? What is the difference between planting a budded plant two inches deeper so it has multiple canes protruding from the soil to encourage it to go own root and planting an own root plant two inches deeper to encourage it to develop multiple, own root plants? You can suffocate many plants by planting them too deeply or raising the soil level around them after they are established. What about those which don't go own root, remaining dependent upon their budded roots? New basals come from the bud union. Pushing it deeper into the soil reduces what stimulates it to produce new basals. If own root plants need to be planted at their original growing level, what is so different about budded plants? Run your own experiment. Buy two, identical budded roses and plant one each way, following each style of advice for them. See which performs to your satisfaction. I honestly have not done that. I have witnessed what I've described and how the plants responded to being planted "properly". VERY seldom has being planted too deeply produced results I found beneficial. In fact, the only case which comes to mind was with the Harkness Hulthemia hybrid, Euphrates. Erosion buried the imported plant which responded by rooting from every cane. Instead of one, vigorous budded plant, I had MANY, smaller, smaller growing own root plants. I can't explain why the person writing this thinks or thought that way. Just as I can't explain why someone in a climate not requiring it for winter protection, would advise pruning HTs to 18" every year. Most roses are so bloody persistent, they will live to spite you. But, they will probably not be as good as they COULD have been. Kim

Ingrid, I would agree that deadheading isn't necessary. It's new info for me about RJG and the above-mentioned others benefiting from deadheading due to their HT linkage. I'll have to remember that. My Le Vesuve has been struggling this year with A LOT of dieback and lack of foliage and blooms. It may be that its roots have penetrated into the crappy white clay below my amended soil, but it is a far less healthy and impressive bush than it was in previous years. I may have to dig it up and re-excavate its bed. I've had stink bugs this year which "singe" new growth, but there isn't even any new growth on the last several inches of the canes on Le Vesuve. I miss him being the bloom machine that he was. Personally, deadheading him was always a pleasure because I only had to walk around his round bed and snap away. He's my centerpiece so I always kept him deadheaded. This summer I have totally neglected the garden including Le Vesuve, so his current condition could possibly be due to neglect, but knowing Teas, I kinda don't think so. I'm pretty sure I'll be digging him up and replanting him like I did Mme Abel Chatenay. I think you're safe not deadheading the downhill sides of your Le Vesuves. Sherry Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

It is a nice list, but I have companion planted forever and want to stress that it is far from a proven science. In fact, in multiple university studies, the companion planting claims do not hold up in controlled studies done to study their efficacy. I am at the point that I ignore all those comments about "improves growth or flavor" and I ignore 98% of the comments about any type of plant repelling specific pests. Very few of those supposed benefits have been observed in my garden, and I've been companion planting in this location ever since we moved here in 1999. The reason to companion plant is to attract beneficial insects, and that's why I do it. Here's one example from what I've learned over the years: I can surround my cabbage beds, for example, with a solid border of all the companion plants said to repel cabbage worms, and my cabbage plants (and all other brassicas susceptible to the same pests) will be totally devoured by cabbage worms anyway. Often, those cabbage worms are sitting so close to the plants that supposedly repel them that they can use the companion plants to travel from one cabbage plant to another. So, take those sorts of recommendations with a grain of salt and just save yourself the hassle by growing your brassicas underneath row covers or insect netting placed over low tunnel hoops. It is the single most effective thing I've done in my garden in terms of deterring all types of brassica type caterpillar pests from devouring brassica plants. It is a gazillion times easier and more efficient/productive that devoting garden space to companion plants that don't repel the pests anyway, and it is preferable to using Bt 'kurstaki' in the garden, since the Bt can harm desirable butterflies. In the back garden I felt like I had some success with common wormwood repelling some but not all caterpillars from brassicas, but common wormwood is a garden thug that gets huge and reseeds readily. Fortunately for me, I believe the flooding of 2015 killed all my wormwood. I don't intend to replant it, and live in fear of it spontaneously making a comeback from self-sown seed and taking over the whole back garden again. There are some things that do seem to work. For example, growing horseradish (preferably in pots since it is invasive) does seem to help (though not 100%) keep Colorado Potato Bugs off your potato plants. But, guess what? If the CPBs show up and are repelled from the potato plants by nearby horseradish, guess where the CPBS will go? Straight to the tomato plants. So, remember you also can see some unintended consequences. I find hand-picking and drowning the CPBs as soon as they show up to be the best way to manage them. It is important to find them the first day they show up, before they can breed and lay eggs. Growing basil with tomatoes seems to help repel hornworms, but you'll see an occasional hornworm on a plant anyway. I feel like four o'clocks planted as a heavy border along two sides of the garden also repel hornworms. Otherwise, there's no real explanation for how I can grow hundreds of tomato plants each year and almost never see more than 1 to 6 hornworms the entire growing season. The area where companion plants shine is in the way they attract beneficial insects, which serve multiple purposes in your garden. This is how I use companion plants nowadays, after determining that their other reported benefits are hard to see, hard to prove and harder and harder to believe. For attracting beneficials, you need a wide range of companion plants, and the most important is to have something that is green and, hopefully, in bloom virtually year-round. Diversity is important so instead of growing tons and tons of each companion plant, I grow a few of many, many different plants. The most useful plants for attracting a wide range of beneficials are those that have small flowers or large flowerheads composed of many small flowers (like yarrow, tansy, sweet alyssum, etc.) and daisy type flowers. I feel like the flowers/herbs that attract the most beneficial insects to our garden are these: sweet alyssum, dill, fennel, yarrow, statice, purple poppy mallow, petunias (especially Laura Bush petunias with their heat tolrance), feverfew, nicotiana, small flowered marigolds like lemon gem, tangerine gem, and red gem, cilantro/coriander (you have to leave it and let it bloom in order to attract the beneficials so you don't harvest this cilantro as cilantro but you can harvest the seeds for coriander), parsley, tansy, silver tansy, comfrey, zinnias, cosmos, buckwheat, spike speedwell, nasturtiums, and moss rose. Many other herbs will attract beneficial insects once they flower, and this includes catnip, catmint, lemon balm, sage, basil, mints (in pots only as they are incredibly invasive), borage, and wormwood. The beneficial insects that I most want to attract to my garden, in addition to bees of all kinds, are green lacewings, brown lacewings, hover flies, lady bugs, minute pirate bugs, big-eyed bugs, and all the little parasitic wasps like brachonid wasps, ichneumoid waspas, and trichogrammas wasps. The plants I listed above do attract them and I think the beneficial wasps, in specific, are why I don't have a lot of caterpillars anyway, notwithstanding the annual onslaught of cabbage worms. I believe the beneficial wasps eventually, in due time, would control the cabbage worms, but before that could happen, you'd have holey plants, so I just exclude them from the plants in the first place. You don't have to run out and buy tons of packets of flower and herb seeds. Many seed companies sell pollinator blends and good bug blends that attract bees and other pollinators as well as the beneficial insects I listed above. You can buy as little as one seed packet of pollinator or good bug attracting plants, or you can buy the mixes by the quarter pound or pound. I have used seed mixes like these from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, Wildseed Farms and Botanical Interests, among others. Because many of the plants that attract pollinators are large, getting quite tall and spreading out wide, the easiest way to grow them is as border plants along the edges of your garden. You can choose smaller, more compact companion plants to grow in the same beds as your garden plants, but understand that even these can take up a lot of space if you aren't careful. It is hard enough to squeeze them into a large garden, and considerably harder to find space for them in small gardens. A lot of the herbs and flowers I grow to attract beneficials are grown as shorter border plants along the edges of raised beds or, if they are too tall to be true edging plants, I grow them at the ends of each raised bed, but not in the middles of the bed where the actual crop plants are growing. If you've ever seen a borage plant growing and spreading massively to try to outgrow the tomato plants beside it, you'll understand where I'm coming from. Of course, almost all my companion plants reseed readily, popping up anywhere and everywhere. I try to let them stay where they sprouted when I can, but if they start to outgrow the vegetable plants they're sitting next to, I either prune them back really hard or yank them out. I also grow tons of wildflowers outside the garden fence on all sides of the garden because they also attract beneficials. The area where most people fall short when planting to attract beneficials is that they fail to plan for the cool season. I have lady bugs, bees and other beneficial insects out even in January, frantically searching for food, so I do the best I can to provide for them. I always leave henbit wherever it pops up and let it bloom because so many beneficials depend on it in the cool-season. I have sweet alyssum and chamomile in bloom by February of most years and they attract many beneficials. I often have dianthus and violas blooming in February or early March. For early beneficials, you need extra-early plants to attract them and also to feed them. I never, ever, ever under any condition would consider ground ivy/Creeping Charlie to be a companion plant. It is a rampant, highly-invasive thug and I don't tolerate it anywhere. If you let it take hold and get established, you'll have it forever and it will be on a constant mission to take over every square inch of planting space, and it isn't just happy to occupy the garden. It will fight to stay in the lawn and in flower beds. Right now, if you walk out into my frozen garden, you'll still find green catnip plants (regrown since we dropped down to 4 degrees a few weeks ago), tansy and dianthus. You'll also find beneficial insects on them on all but the coldest days. You may not see the beneficial insects early in the morning on cold days, but you'll see them out by mid-day. When planting both cosmos and zinnias to attract beneficial insects, search out old-fashioned varieties that haven't had their nectar/pollen tampered with by modern plant breeders. Also, plant the shorter varieties that stay more compact and are easier to manage or you'll end up with huge cosmos and zinnia plants (easily attaining 4-5' in height) shading out surrounding plants. Same thing with nasturtiums. Grow only the short, busy ones, not the vining ones. While some of the more modern zinnias have tolerance of/resistance to powdery mildew bred into them and they look nice, they don't attract and keep beneficials like the old OP varieties do. I love companion planting and mixing in herbs and flowers with fruits and veggies all over the garden, but you have to manage the way you use companion plants or you'll find too much of your resources (soil, water, even light) going to them and not enough going to the edible plants you're growing. There are a few plants that make great trap plants, attracting pests to them. The way to use them is to grow them outside the garden itself in order to lure those pests away from the garden. Sunflowers are my favorite for this purpose. If you plant sunflowers outside the garden, maybe 10' from the garden, they'll attract stink bugs to them. Then, you can use the method of your choice to kill the stink bugs. Anything I can do to attract stinkbugs away from the garden in summer is worth doing. They are a horrible pest that feed on the fruits of most summer crops. The grain type amaranths are useful in this way to as they can lure some pests away from your garden.