Great job, newbie! I think your garden looks lovely. I lean to the romantic, wild look, so I might let Pat Austin grow and do whatever she wants. The arms will naturally arch, I'm sure. If one wants to, I know people prune them back too. I can see I'm no help. Good luck!

Your garden is beautiful! But I can't help either, I'm afraid.Some Austins get huge in my garden,and I've been trying to train them as climbers, but it seems that they don't bloom much. However my garden is very big and the soil is not great, so I can't keep up with fertilizing, and I don't have running water either, so maybe these factors are the cause.

I love your garden! For a 'newbie', you have a lot of natural gardening talent. Pat Austin gets very large here as well.

I basically have a jungle on the back of the property where I even let a few weeds get monsterous because the butterflies love them. I like the messy look its interesting to go out everyday and see what crazy thing the plants, butterflies, frogs, & bees are doing.

Pat does get octopus arms that kinda curve over. I trim everything back when I feel like it and she will go wild again. She will grow laterals on her bent over canes and keep on flowering.

I think the thing people hate about octopus arms, is when they only bloom on the ends of the branch. If you bend them over or they arch over on their own, then the branches will grow lateral braches, then those will flower. If you then trim the laterals back a little after they flower they will send up new flowers..more branches usually equals more flowers on most kinds of plants :) The more you horizontal you can get the long branches, then more nodes are exposed to sunlight and be stimulated to branch upwards.

A lot of mine have gotten large and the branches are kinda sprawled on top of each other and other plants so they are kinda horizontal that way. Munstead Wood has some 10 ft canes that are laying intertwined with a climbing rose and some passion flowers. Some people would be outraged at those long braches but I think its interesting. Then again, my garden can't be seen from the street or any neighbors lol.

~Sjn

I have two bushes of Bishop's Castle that have this same tendency, although I don't know if BC is as vigorous as PA. At any rate the long arms hang down with the flowers on the ground, and my practice is to cut any cane that has quit flowerin back into the bush, and it doesn't seem to stop it from flowering, although I suspect it may take away some of the energy and keep the bushes smaller, which is a good thing where they're situated. In your beautiful garden I would be tempted to do the same thing to keep the roses in scale with your other plantings, but obviously you can adopt the other practices by leaving the canes long. You need to make the judgment based on the look you want to achieve

Goodness, it's amazing to see what you have created in such a short time. It's beautiful. Can't help with PA, I'm afraid, but I'm sure you'll sort it!

Thank you so much, everybody, for your kind compliments! I don't think I can really claim credit - I think it's the Australian sunshine which makes everything grow like crazy. I've just been faithfully watering. :-) I'm also a bit of an OCD perfectionist so I've been reading up a lot on best practices and probably overdoing things. If a book says amend the soil to 1 feet deep, I'll probably do it 2 feet deep as I'm anxious to make sure it's as good as can be! And I prune & deadhead obsessively - the minute there's a brown leaf on a plant, it's gone! I call it "grooming" the plants. LOL. I'm sure it's just newbie fervour and once the novelty wears off, I probably won't be so keen!

Also, I've only been gardening in our nicest seasons so far - which is winter & spring - so I don't think I've met the "tough times" yet - people tell me that a lot of things will shrivel up and die in Jan/Feb (our mid-summer) when temps can reach the low 40s C (100's F) and it's relentless sun & hot winds blowing... so I'm bracing myself for that! I guess I'm just enjoying it while I can.

I do have the typical horrible Western Australia sandy soil, which
doesn't hold water and has very low nutrients. I have removed some of the original "topsoil" (more like
top sand!) and imported in some "proper" soil with clay mixed in from a
garden supplier, and I've been adding manure and mulching (and I've also
started a compost bin but that's going to take months) - but it's
disheartening when you dig just a few feet down and all you see is dry,
grey sand.

Thank you for all your thoughts and suggestions on Pat!

Bart - that must be tough not having running water in the garden! I really sympathise!

SultryJasmineNights - your garden sounds lovely! Just my kind of place! And you made me laugh with the image of all those long rose canes sprawled all over, lying on other plants.

Titian - how exciting to meet another Aussie gardener!

Ingrid - that's great to know that cutting the octopus arms back won't stop flowering. I think I will do what you suggested and prune them back to the bush once the ends have finished flowering. I think that's probably better in the long term as I do have a really tiny garden and you're right - she does seem totally out of scale now.

I have a bad feeling that all the DA roses I got will eventually look ridiculous in my tiny garden, as given the size they can get to in Australia, they're probably more suited to an English manor estate!! :D

Thank you so much again!

~ NRL

The more you deadhead deep the more she blooms. Those long canes if trained horizontally and their tips are cut will eventually produce flowering laterals but maybe not in the same year. If you prune them to the rest of the shrub they will produce two or three shorter canes which will bloom. These pruned canes will become new structural basals so you can remove some older ones at winter pruning time. It depends on how you want her to look. I tend to prune her quite severely in the HT way to about 50cm in late winter leaving 4-6 young strong basals and then deadhead deep throughout the season. She's never without blooms. One more good rose DA are phasing out..

PS For those who grow Abraham Darby, Pat seems to me to have the same general pattern of growth although Abe seems a bit more vigorous.

Thanks, Nik! That's really reassuring to hear that Pat will still bloom well if I cut back the octopus canes. I was worried about that. I will do what you suggested - thank you, you explained the pruning steps really clearly and it was very helpful.

By the way, when you say "prune them to the rest of the shrub" - do you mean cut the long canes at exactly the same height as the top/outer edge of the shrub? Or a bit shorter, to allow for the fact that if it produces shorter lateral canes, these might grow longer and taller than the rest of the shrub again?

Thank you!

Prune them somewhat shorter but Pat, in my experience, cannot easily be grown as a well rounded shrub. She will always look a bit like she's having a bad hair day, so don't worry too much about such details.

Ha! Ha! Ha! ... "She will always look a bit like she's having a bad hair day" - that's hilarious!

OK - I will try my best (as you've probably guessed, I have a tendency to obsess over details! ;-) )

Thanks again!

ps. I got Abraham Darby as well - but he was only planted a few weeks ago and so he's only just started sprouting new growth. I guess I'd better look forward to wrestling with HIS octopus arms! ;-)

Wow! I have a lot to learn on pot culture.

OMG, Daisy - that's absolutely STUNNING!!! Amazing that you can grow a rose so huge & beautiful & healthy in a pot! I hope my Pat will be half as beautiful as yours, one day! So far, I find it a bit frustrating that although she has a lot of buds, they never seem to open all at once - so that I get the effect like in your photos of roses all over the bush. They seem to just open one or two at a time - or at the most, in a cluster. Do you think this is because the bush isn't mature yet?

Thank you for the parasol suggestion! Yes, I'd like to do the same. The only problem is, mine is in the middle bed and there isn't really any space to put up an umbrella, which would need a heavy base, etc. I did suggest buying one but my husband wasn't keen. He thinks it will clutter up our already tiny garden. Looking at yours, I'm really tempted to get an obelisk or something so that my Pat can climb up it - but I think, given the size of my tiny garden, I'm probably better to do as Nik suggested and prune Pat down to size - and hope she'll still bloom as a smaller bush.

Anyway, thank you again!

I had no idea something could be so huge in a pot.

Newbie, your garden is stunning . Well done. Personally, I cut back my octopus arms, just personal preference. I guess I try for a symmetrical look but some of those Austins have a mind of their own.

Thank you, Kristine! Yes, I think I'll be cutting back too. At least that way I might just have a slightly smaller monster to contend with, rather than encouraging her to go ahead and become a huge one! ;-)

Am just going to wait for the clusters on the end to flower... and then I'll do it!

By the way - off topic - is there any way to post photos without having to upload them into the post? I tried hosting them on another site first and just pasting the URLs in my original post but they only showed up as links, not embedded photos.
Is there a way of doing that? I've seen older posts where you had embedded photos from Photobucket and other places...
Thank you.

Daisy, is that even real....that is just beautiful!! What a rose! Newbie, welcome...you are so gonna become addicted like the rest of us. This fabulous group has created a monster with me!!

Haha - thanks gaglzone! I'm already addicted!! :-)