The good thing about roses is that they are always putting out new canes and you can train them easier than old ones. This is true! Back when I was a teenager, in the 1970's, I inherited a 1950's book on growing roses (can't presently remember the authors' names, but they were serious rosarians). In that book there were three photos of a Harrison's Yellow rose (a beautiful early spring, once-blooming yellow shrub rose) they rehabilitated. In the first picture it is a sprawling mess that has few flowers. In the second picture they tied all the main canes together and pegged them low to the ground, away from the crown of the bush, and consequently a whole new set of primary canes were shooting vertically from the bases of those old canes. In the third picture the old canes were gone and the new canes were blooming like crazy. It was obvious they had completely rejuvenated the bush by the simple technique of tying the old canes collectively to the ground and consequently stimulating the shrub to put out an entirely new set of major canes for them to work with. The nice thing about a big rose is that as long as the growing conditions are to its liking you absolutely can rehabilitate it. Doing so requires a certain amount of sensitivity and expertise, but that can be learned.

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.

Sheryl, what you can do with roses like the last picture is just wait till one of those clusters stops blooming and cut the whole cluster back further down on the stem. The rose is big enough that a little haircut like that won't bother it at all, and that would involve no more than a dozen pruning cuts for the blooms there. You do want to deadhead when possible because it signals the rose to keep putting out more blooms, assuming it's a repeat bloomer. Cynthia

Hi edanz, The new canes that are sprouting off of the old, pruned-back canes (whether those old canes are 3 inches or 3 feet) should become your new main canes. Let them grow long, and don't prune them at the ends. These canes should grow long. You can gently train these canes to do what you want, but be careful not to bend them sharply or tie them too tightly. As you train the canes in a more horizontal fashion, the laterals will sprout along the sides of the canes. It is possible for a cane that started as a lateral to become a main cane. Not all of a climber's main canes need to be from basals (those canes that sprout from the base of the rose) but basal canes are good because they renew the structure of the rose, providing fresh, strong new canes that will be very productive. As the rose matures and (hopefully) throws up lots of new canes, you can selectively remove some of the old canes during spring pruning. With your young rose I suggest you avoid pruning it, and only deadhead blooms coming off of laterals this year.