I love your descriptions of your garden, Melissa. The way you observe plants over time and then note what they want to do (as opposed to what you thought you wanted them to do) and work with them rather than against them is inspiring. I've got a Jaune Desprez arriving in the mail from Burling and thanks to comments on this forum I'm now planning on building a pergola for it rather than trying to train it on a fence (which I was told it would likely find unsatisfactory for its deep desire to grow UP. Hopefully that will be enough for it to express that need to ascend vertically before extending horizontally. Now I just have to get a bunch of other projects done before I can get to work on a pergola, lol!

Thank you for sharing these beautiful descriptions with us. The. picture of your garden in my head is gorgeous.

K S, I hope you like JD, and (don't know whether you want my opinion) I think your plan for it is a good one. It comes just after 'La Mortola' in thorniness, by the way, but it's a great rose. Mine goes up to a balcony on a first floor, where I tie it to the railing, but last year we added a--guess what?--pergola, nice and sturdy, nice and horizontal, and expanding 'Jaune Desprez's potential territory considerably. One reason I wanted the pergola was so that the rose would keep the summer sun out of our living room window: there's a practical reason for our planting.

Melissa, I laughed when I saw the title of your (as usual) beautifully written post. I have a Hybrid Musk (Pax) which is a one cane wonder, with a lot of foliage way on the top of it, where it is climbing into a Japanese maple tree. I can't take a pic of it (pouring, pouring down rain again today), but below is a pic which I took yesterday when the sun was out. You can see only a very lower bit of the part where the foliage is, on the upper right of the pic. Strange way to grow, right? "The rest of the story" is that this cane tip rooted itself from a much bigger Pax bush growing all over that now bare wall you can see years ago, and was growing up inside of the other Pax - as you say, growing for light. The larger bush was removed last Summer, to comply with the orders of our local Fire Dept, because it was touching the wall of the house. My gardener managed to save the second bush (the straight pole in the pic is supporting it). What was left was this amazingly tall bare cane with a "rose bush" on the top. When it is sunny again, I will take a pic of the entire thing. The strange shaped one bloomed happily for the past 3 years, inside of the tree. I have taken hope and courage from your post - I will see if I can do something with it to make it be more horizontal (at least at the top).

Jackie

Sending out long first year canes which then branch and fill in during subsequent years is normal for tall growing roses - a body needs to be looking at more than random individual specimens to reach reliable conclusions.

Scientific control - Wikipedia

Embothrium, I think most of us gardeners are aware of the scientific limitations of our personal observations in our gardens. But trying to figure out what is happening there is a large part of the fun of gardening.

I'll add this. The scientific method itself is limited when applied to an individual garden. It relies on duplication of a set of conditions, varying only one element in order to test the effects of the difference; and then duplicating the situation and its results. Gardening isn't like that. Every garden is an extremely complex sum of numberless factors, all varying from one garden to the next, from one spot in a garden to the next, and, in the same spot in the same garden, from one moment to the next: soil, rain, sun, light, vegetation, gardening practices: all of them infinitely variable. Certainly science has its place in gardening, but so do experience and intuition: "Fingerspitzengefuehl", the feeling of the tips of the fingers, in the application of what we know, or at least what we think we know. Gardening isn't science, not entirely; it's also art. It's also the pleasure, and the fun, of finding things out for oneself: pre-science in its most primitive, but deeply satisfactory, phase.

Totally agree with you, Melissa. Gardening is definitely NOT science ,IMO. There is never "one right answer" in gardening. Science can be applied to gardening, I suppose, but there are plenty of really good gardeners who know zip about science.

Understanding the science behind certain plant behaviors helps us make better use of the knowledge.

When a rose sends up a long vertical shoot, the meristematic growing point produces an auxin that flows (by gravity) down the cane, signaling the buds at each leaf axil to stay dormant. When you train one of these canes horizontally, the flow of that signaling auxin is interrupted, and the axillary buds are no longer receiving the "stay dormant" signal. This results in many axillary buds along the cane bursting into growth and flower.

Knowing this, its easy to see why training canes horizontally has such a significant effect on the volume of bloom a rose produces. Knowing this, you can train your roses so that the meristematic tip is lower than the rest of the cane, which prompts shoots forming at the leaf axils. This is why "pegging" works the way it does.