3 Reasons to Deadhead Roses

Hi it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and today I'd like to spend a little bit of time with you on deadheading. Now deadheading of course just means removing a spent flower once it starts to turn brown. You can see this one's deeply faded around the edges it's on its way out so I deadhead it by snipping it off. Now there are basically three different reasons why you might deadhead a rose. I want to go through all three of them today because believe it or not the why you do it affects the what you do. So this example here is a rose called Gold Medal and although this is still fairly pretty I have to say it pales in comparison to the flowers when they're fresh. This bright gold color is kind of what I'm after. So this bloom here is on its way out and this of course is almost completely blown. This is fully blown it's actually lost its own petals. The best reason why or the first reason why I would talk about deadheading is to encourage the rose to go back into repeat bloom and to do that just picking off the head is enough although generally what we're going to talk about is removing it down to a lower leaf set something like that removing the whole stem and I'll talk about why that is. Now for this first reason getting your roses to return to bloom quickly I have to say that it only applies to repeat blooming roses. This one here as a Grandiflora is a repeat blooming rose so it will get the benefit of me pulling off these flowers. This rose on the other hand is Constant Spry it's a David Austin rose it's very much worth enjoying in the garden but it does not repeat bloom it only blooms once in the late spring or early summer and then it's finished for the season so no amount of effort that I put into removing spent blooms none of that is going to pay off so I may as well just leave it on the shrub until I do a tidy up after the entire bloom period. Returning to that question of whether to just pull off the flowers themselves or whether to cut a little bit lower down it's worth noting the common piece of advice around the leaflet numbers and I'm going to show you some examples here this is a leaflet from up near the flower right up here and that has three leaflets on it that one leaf has three leaflets on it that's modified typically on this variety we can have five leaflets on a leaf and that's lower down on the shrub sometimes you'll even see that number be seven that's just genetic but the larger leaf number reduces to a smaller leaf number right up at the buds near the flowers so if you remove the flowers like this just pulling them off here this leaf this leaf that has three leaflets has a bud behind it that is more or less an active growth and it will resume active growth and return to flower very quickly because it's just an active growth there's a botanical term for that called seleptic which means it just hasn't taken a pause or a dormancy in that bud on the other hand if you wanted to look at something like this here this here has uh I'm going to cut this back to the leaf that has the five leaflets here so I hope you can see that on screen but that's the five leaflet set the bud behind that is called proleptic means it had a turn at dormancy or a slight dormancy induced in it and our impetus for doing it a little bit lower down like that is that a bud that was induced into slight dormancy actually grows a thicker stem with more vascular tissues so you're more likely to get a larger stem with more flowering potential off of it so both will do the job just oftentimes if you just pull off the flower you get a quick return to flower off of this upper bud or this one here takes a slight delay and then gives you a better stem for later on so I said there were three reasons why I do my pruning the first one was the faster prune to flowers the second one is for reshaping and getting your hands on the rows to train it and prune it to a size and shape that you like so it sounds a lot like spring pruning well frankly deadheading is a form of pruning and you should view it that way as your opportunity to get your hands on your plant so looking at this flowering stem here and you can see that this is a cluster flower yes there's still plenty of color on there but that's definitely not fresh this section here so I'm going to use it as an example here and looking at this as a cluster flowering thing you might remove it right here and you would do that as a way to again return it to flowering but myself I might be inclined to go even a little bit lower something like this to bring it down to the general height of the shrub so that it resumes growth a little bit lower and then matches the other stems because if I leave it tall and high like this on the one side it's going to get out of shape and basically expand on this side while this side is still fairly low so I'm using it as an opportunity not only to get those stronger flowering buds from lower but I'm also using as an opportunity to correct imbalances in the shrub my third reason for deadheading is just cosmetic but the thing is I don't want to downplay that because in a rose garden keeping in mind these are plants for your enjoyment to look at and if they start to look like wet paper towel like this and start to turn brown on the edges it starts to reduce the enjoyment of the plant so if you have your printers with you make that same cosmetic cut down to the next five leaf leaf set or lower depending on what you want to do with the shape of the shrub or if you don't have your printers in your hand or you're dealing with a cluster of flowers like this one here it's fine to just go there and reach and pull that off and so if you have a cluster flowering rose typically I'd say wait until the whole cluster is done save yourself the work but if it starts to look like this and you're expecting visitors you're doing a tour that kind of thing just going in there and pulling off the spent blooms tossing them aside or collecting them up and taking them away all of that is just fine and that goes equally for repeat bloomers like Eden here that looks otherwise quite good but just needs a little bit of attention on those that have started to fall apart or even on these old garden roses that bloom only once in the season but it's going to extend your enjoyment of them just to remove the spent flowers and let the buds get their chance to display without those dead petals around them all right those are my three reasons for why you might want to deadhead your roses and if there's a takeaway to take from this it's not to blindly follow that five leaflets rule to go down to the next five leaflet set and then just cut right there sometimes it's fully appropriate to just reach in and pull off dead heads where they exist other times it totally makes sense to take a larger braver cut to improve what would be a shape problem or condition problem in the rose thanks for watching if you have any questions please go ahead and drop those into the comments below the video and i'll see what i can do to help