OK, a few more examples:
Sometimes you have to look at a rose from all sides to make sure that
the cane is healthy entirely in the canes you leave behind. For
instance, this cane looked OK from the front side at first.
However, turned on the other side there was a huge split in the cane and other black marks that made it doomed and need to be pruned off. The green in this cane isn't enough to make the canes survive.
In some regions of the country, there are insects or larvae that burrow down in cut canes and wreak havoc with canes that aren't sealed off. Here, the cane will die as far as the burrow goes, but it rarely goes more than an inch or so deep. I prune these kinds of canes off early up in the cane but may leave a little bit of the hole in a cane if I can tell it stops within eyesight. Again, in some zones you want to take every bit of this off because you may not be able to trust your eyes:
Here's a shot with some red canes that are in my iffy zone, and some obviously black canes for Mint Julep in the rear that looks totally dead to the ground.
Some cold zoners might despair that Mint Julep is dead, but as the wise Miracle Max would put it, this rose is only "mostly dead". And as every good Princess Bride fan knows, mostly dead means somewhat alive. Sure enough, way down at the base of the rose is one little growing point and a hint of green. Even roses that I prune down to the ground are at least 50/50 just fine and will rebound without a problem. Gilbert Becaud is always pruned to the ground with nothing visibly alive for several weeks, but he always comes back (even though I fret over him as I love his colors and he's no longer replaceable).
Then there are the roses that really don't need any pruning of dead wood as they laugh off the cold. That doesn't mean that every cold hardy rose is going to be tip hardy. Quadra is hardy to zone 2 or 3, but every year some of the canes die even to the ground, and I need to go in and thin him out. Fortunately that not the case often for Darlow's Enigma since he wants to be a scruffy bush with lots of teeny tiny cane ends everywhere. There are dead ends that I could prune off to tidy him up, but really why bother? I'll wait till he fully leafs out or blooms and those dead ends bother me (i they do), but half the time he'll drop off nonfunctional canes without any help from me anyway.
An intermediate rose is something like Savoy Hotel, which is definitely cane hardy but benefits from a little spring tidying of some dead tips or canes. Here's a whole bush shot before pruning:It's a little hard to tell its canes from the more dead ones of roses behind it, but there's at least a cane stub at the center bottom, broken canes at the lower left and upper right, and some dead end or black canes and stubs in a few narrow tips of canes, as you can see in a closeup here.
And here Savoy Hotel is after pruning, trying to get an angle that doesn't catch other still unpruned roses behind it. Incidentally, the greenish red canes visible at center behind Savoy Hotel are additional examples of 50/50 likely live cane that I'm leaving on the bush for now. You can see growing points out of the cane and a trial cut on the cane comes out creamy.
That's enough for now! I'm sure everyone else will have opinions as there are a lot of different methods for pruning and decision rules we all use. I just figured that seeing examples of canes would be helpful for newbies in making decisions in cold zones, since it's definitely pruning season in these parts. Three more beds to go and I'm done - several weeks earlier than I usually am!
Cynthia
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