Well, I'm no expert, only been growing climbers about 3 years but here's what I do. First,it depends on your structure, the ones I grow on walls or trellises I fan out the canes &tie them in, when it's time to prune I cut the laterals back to about 8"-12", & only cut back the main canes if they are damaged. On my pergola I wrap the main canes around the posts to promote more laterals & prune the same way. New Dawn is a beast & a bully, you will probably donate much blood! In the books they recommend not pruning climbers the first 2-3 years but I had to with New Dawn. Oh, the reason you train them horizontally is for more blooms otherwise you will only get one bloom at the end of each vertical cane. Hope this helps. Perhaps someone with more experience will chime in.

Jane

Keeping canes vertical will make it grow taller. Bending canes to horizontal will produce flowers. So depending on what you want the canes to do you can mix and match as you wish. You can bend both primary canes as well as the laterals. Very fine laterals and those growing in the wrong place/directions can be cut out.

Is your New Dawn growing on a structure or conquering your back yard? I'd plan a structure of some sort if needed. Let it bloom this spring, then buy goatskin gauntlets and prune the laterals.

I too am new to pruning climbers and would like some clarification. Let's say you want to train the rose to arch over a window and run along the eave. So you let the main cane(s) grow up and bend them across the top of the window and on across that horizontal line. Will the cane remain a main cane, or does it BECOME a lateral? Once a lateral always a lateral, even if growing vertically? Also, what are the relative merits of having more or fewer main cane? If you have multiple main canes, should they be tied loosely together?

While your at it you may want to look into getting a pruner that not only cuts but grabs the limb cut off so you can remove it. Check these folks out, it's where I got mine and I love it.... wildflower-seed.com

Also check this video out at youtube:

How to Rejuvenate an Old Climbing Rose That Has Stopped Flowering.

Kitasei, I'm no expert either, but this video gives a good explanation/visual demonstration of changing a lateral to a main cane. To answer your second question, I wouldn't tie the main canes together unless I was seriously limited in terms of space where I wanted the rose to grow. If you have a very narrow area to fill up and over your window, you might be better off pruning out all but one or two main canes as the space allows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf7F5qhChFM

My New Dawn rose is growing on a structure, sort of. It's the bottom 10 feet of a 3 legged antenna tower that was knocked down during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. All the roses growing in my yard were washed away (we had 2 feet of water in our home). The New Dawn was planted in hope of hiding the ugly tower which is mounted in a concrete base. So the rose is about 18 inches away from the support. When I was unable to take care of regular pruning it grew out of bounds so now in addition to being wrapped around the tower, it is covering the surrounding wall. I have the same confusion as kitassei above, which ones are canes and which ones are laterals? It shoots out new stems so long, that don't fit onto either tower or wall. And I'm not getting many blooms. Help!

New Dawn, and all the other repeat blooming hardy climbers I know, actively snigger at the nice, neat little drawings of training climbers in rose books. For one thing, they are very much 3-D objects, which take up a larger footprint than often expected. So one reason you are having a hard time distinguishing between main canes and laterals is that it is a *human* distinction that has little to do with what the rose is doing.

If it isn't giving a good spring flush, I'd suspect something else is going on besides lack of pruning. Repeat bloom is heavily dependent on deadheading, so that is where the pruning issue is going to show up. If the rose is simply taking up too much room, find a handy suit of armor and wade in.

My honest feeling is that this isn't really the right rose for the location - that there are warm climate climbers that would do a better job of hiding the tower and be easier to train. However, I don't know those.

I think I'm stuck with this one! But you're probably right about the deadheading. I'll try to stay on top of that this year! And also, many thanks to Arlene for the video tip. I found all Paul Zimmerman's video very helpful. Was new to me!

I have 3 New Dawns, one repeats- 2 don't-went back to their parent-once bloomer. Dead heading is the key for a New Dawn to rebloom.