Too Sick to Prune a Climbing Rose for Years? Here's What to Do!

A viewer recently asked me a question many gardeners worry about. If you get sick and you cannot take care after your climbing rose for several years, what will happen to a rose? Will it survive? And what to do when you are ready to return back into the garden? Well, the answer can be far more encouraging than you think. Most gardening advice assumes that life is going according to the plan. We are happy, energetic, healthy, skipping around the garden like rabbits on a green field, right? Well, sometimes family illnesses, disabilities, caregiving tasks, you name it, can move in and gardening is going to the bottom of the list, right? It happened to all of us. So can the climbing rose survive? Can you leave it for several years and then come back to it? And what will happen during those several, three, four, five years to our climbing rose? Well, that is the fear. But the good news is that climbing roses took care of themselves very well even before gardeners started to carry their pruning secateurs, right? So what might happen? Let's say you're ill, you cannot take care of your rose for four years. What will happen to your rose? Your rose will get more tangled, that's for sure, because you're not going to control those long canes. So my Katrina probably will, those long canes will be laying here because the sun is there. I'm training my Katrina back to go this way, but soon you will see all the long canes. I trained one here, look at this, it wants to go this way. And if I let it go, it will extend all the way there near the steps of my patio. That's where it will land. So a lot of tangled, long canes growing in all sorts of directions, which is really not harmful to the rose, right? It's just a big mess. Second, the accumulation of old wood. So what we do with our climbers, we take away that old wood, so we do nature's task, but we do it a little bit quicker. Oh my gosh, this bee is buzzing here near my ear. You know how they go in, I told you. But it's so cute to hear and it happens on Katrina rose a lot. This is the biggest attractor of pollinators in my gardens, this rose. Maybe to its wild genes, due to its wild genes. All right, let's go back to dead wood. Accumulation of dead wood is happening and it will happen more and more through the year. As a result, more air congestion, stiff air, it will be all packed in there and maybe more diseases will move in if your rose genetically is not a strong rose and cannot fight on its own. Then you will have less blooms and blooms are going to move further up because you're not helping your rose, you're not training those stems horizontally. All the blooms are going to grow vertically, meaning all the stems are going to grow vertically and only there somewhere near the sky, near the second floor, you will get a bloom. So that's the story of what will happen to your rose. But messy doesn't mean bad, right? So what should you do during these four, three, four, five years when you cannot take care of your rose? Well, there are three things which I would advise, which I will advise you to do, and they are like bare, bare minimum. First thing, try to tie those long canes to the support. Whatever grows is growing. It doesn't have to be a super wonderful job, just to make sure that those long new canes are not swaying against the wind. Because what will happen? Your rose will create those canes, right? And if the winds are going to sway it, it will snap probably at the end where it is growing from the main cane or from the base. And then you will lose all that growth and next year blooms. And so much energy went into creating something beautiful as that. And that usually happens during winter months when winds are strong and that cane just moves back and forth. So that's bare minimum number one, bare minimum number two. If you have severe droughts, water that rose at least several times in summer. And the last one, bare minimum, do not fertilize. Why is that? Well, fertilizer brings new growth, new flower potentials, right? But then because rose is creating so much top growth, it needs so much water and fertilizer in the soil. And if you don't fertilize, rose won't have energy to grow so much or bloom so much, which is fine. Rose will be more equipped to deal with drought conditions possibly coming in summer, right? In your area. All right, so that is bare minimum what you should do during those four, four, three, five years. Do not worry about fancy pruning. You don't need to prune. Your rose will create hips. It will bloom less or animals will take those hips away. Do not worry about fancy training, training into lateral. Rose can survive that. It doesn't need to be trained that way for survival. You will get just smaller blooms. That's it. Don't worry about watering and fertilizing and dancing around your roses like I do, right? Okay, and now the last thing. What should be done when you are healthy, strong, diseases in the past, family crisis is over and you're ready to go back into your garden? Well, don't kill yourself the first day you're doing all the chores. Don't try to do everything at once. So I would, what I would do, I would first, I will take all the dead wood out that year, the first year, right? Taking care of your roses, clean it up. All the dead, diseased, unproductive, I will just cut out. That would be the first year. And second year, I would look which canes are really super old. They're still producing blooms, but they're kind of old. I would take them out. I would fertilize my rose. We'll start training long, nice new canes into horizontal condition. And slowly I will get my rose back into track the way it should be in the garden, right? And then next year, your rose should start following the usual routine in the garden. Have you ever had a plant waiting for you through a difficult part of your life, a difficult season of your life? If you did, please share under these videos. I would love to read your stories. Happy gardening. I'm going to dance around my roses, right?