How to Prune a Climbing Rose

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TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I’m Andi from Ashridge Nurseries. I'm just here and I'm going to prune this climbing rose. It's got a bit congested and there's a few little bits of dead wood. So we're going to focus on firstly cutting out the dead material, anything that I think is diseased, and then I'm going to give it a bit of shape. We're going to cut back to buds and new growth.
It's a fairly easy job that anybody can tackle. You just need a pair of secateurs and maybe some loppers for the thicker bits. It's nice and early spring here and winter’s done with, you can see the sun is shining - it's the perfect time of year to give this a nice little haircut. So let's get onto that.
When we're pruning, see this is an earlier cut from earlier in the year. We don't want these little stumpy bits. What we want is a nice clean cut, close to the shoot. And that's much better because that won’t die back and introduce disease. So we always want to cut to a node, which is a growing point, and that's really important with a rose. It keeps them nice and tidy and healthy.
I’ve got my loppers and I'm going to start by taking this dead stump out nice and easy, and it was dead. And I’ll need secateurs to get in there. You can see I've got my gloves on because this is a very spiky rose, and I'm just going to work from the bottom up. I'm going to have a look at this, I don't like crossing branches, that makes very awkwardness, the branches will rub against each other and that could cause a bit of disease or infection.
I'm just going to start at the bottom. I'm going to look at what I like and what I don't like. I will take away what I don't like. When I'm cutting, you can see we’ve got buds here, so I'm going to cut close to the bud, just above it. And that stops any dieback. We'll look at this awkward piece here and he’s sort of all right. I think I'm going to come back to there and that will direct that growth upwards, up the pergola. I’ll just tuck him back in there.
So I've got to come back down here, and I'm going to be a little more brutal, so that needs to go because it's congested. I’ll tuck that branch under and out of the way for now. This is really awful as well.
That can go from there. What I'm trying to do here is direct growth in the direction that I want. So if we look here, there's no real bud showing. I've got one little one there. So, I've got an upward-facing bud and I want it to grow upwards. So I'm going to just nip that off there and I’m going to clean that end up.
Climbing and rambling roses are a little different to our shrub roses in our borders because they do go a bit messy
I'm going to bring him to there and now I'm going to look back down here, this is too congested for me. So that can come out. We've got some nice new, strong canes coming from the bottom.
You see this, it’s not ideal. I think I'll come back to this next year and we'll look at this and see how it's doing, but I would imagine that's going to have to go. We'll lose those, caw blimey. So when we come to dead wood, it’s always really hard. This looks tidier already.
So we've got some long runners here. I've just tugged them out of the wisteria and they're pruned back to here, which is an upward facing bud and that can tuck back in. And I know that’s going to run up all the rest of the way and we'll do the same here for this one. And again, that's going to grow in there nicely.
So that's as easy as a rose prune gets. You don't want to stress over it too much. It's just a nice, gentle, tidy up and they'll get away. Climbing roses want some height and want some size, so we're never going to prune them hard.
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