That doesn't apply in some areas of the country.

Just the parts that don't have much winter chill.

You should never generalize gardening advice when it comes from another region of the country.

You have to be super careful spraying any kind of oil on your roses. I fried mine once because I did it on a sunny day. It wasn't even very hot, like in the 70s, and they still burnt pretty bad.

With the caveat to all that this is good advice for rose gardeners in Northern California, I appreciate the link as I am in N. CA (although I'll pass on the spraying part!)

Do all roses need to go dormant? Here in Houston, it is still warm and roses are blooming. Our January and February usually are the coldest months, but it quickly warms up in March.

Do roses *need* to go dormant? I find this advice to be extremely doubtful, particularly as a blanket statement. There are plenty of heritage roses from tropical or subtropical areas. They wouldn't be heritage roses if they needed a forced dormancy. Try this advice on your teas and you may have a rude awakening. My cuttings from modern roses, when brought into the greenhouse, grow and bloom through the winter. Gallicas need a dormancy. I don't know if a forced dormancy as they suggest would work to help them bloom. I assume they need a certain number of chill hours, and the practices described won't give them that. Sure, it is wise to have disease control practices, but all roses don't need to go dormant.

Thanks, I was planning to leave them alone, but when I saw this post, wanted to check.

I've always thought of dormancy as something plants can do, more so than something they need to do. It is more of a skill of survival through the cyclical weather patterns of the seasons--evolution and genetic adaptation.

It is a rather insular idea that cold is the only condition that promotes dormancy in plants. In many places in the world dormancy is promoted by lack of water--a dry season if you will. Some of our heat loving roses likes teas and chinas hail from places like that.

I strongly suspect the disaster teas roses are in my 7a garden where they cannot survive through to spring--even though conventional wisdom says it should be warm enough--has more to do with the fact we have significant moisture in the late winter and early spring. It is the moisture that forces them out of dormancy, but then it is still too cold for growing, un-dormant plants to not to be mortally damaged.

We take plants that have evolved under certain weather patterns and then expect them to thrive someplace with a different cycling of conditions all while assuming that dormancy triggers are the same. They aren't.

All that to say, I don't think I would try to force dormancy based on temperature/cold without at least trying to understand the potential genetics of that particular rose.

Here's a thread Cori Ann posted a while back on this very subject for once-bloomers. defoliating-once-blooming-climbing-roses