Rose Bush

[homedeeth]

There is a bush of sorts in my back garden with 1 rose on it.
How do I encourage more roses to grow on it?

[Old_Geezer]

You could go out and threaten it what you'll do if it doesn't buck it's ideas up.

You can get feeds for sprinkling around the bush. Try your local DIY shed or garden centre. And you can 'deadhead' the remains of the bloom once the petals have dropped to encourage more.

[bhg481]

Give it a hard prune at the back-end of the year - cut it back to 6-9 inches. Feed it NOW - roses are very greedy. Remove any suckers - shoots with 7 leaves on each stem (5 on good shoots) and they will probably be paler in colour than the good ones. Suckers come from the base of the plant, below the graft and are the plant trying to revert to a briar; they will take the food from the desired parts of the plant.

[homedeeth]

What is a graft and what is a briar?

[bhg481]

Briars are the original wild roses. Roses that you buy for your garden have been bred for colour/scent/disease resistance etc. Once a new rose has been created it can only be duplicated by taking cuttings from it. You can either let the cuttings grow roots, as you do with geraniums etc, but the usual process is to graft them on to a briar root. If you look at any roses you have you will see a lump in the stem around ground level; this is where the graft was made. Your rose, then, will have a briar root and a hybrid top; unfortunately the briar root sometimes throws up new shoots; these are called suckers and will not produce the sort of flowers that you want. If you do not remove suckers the briar will eventually take over the plant.

[Old_Geezer]

You can get own root roses too. Grafted ones seem more popular though.

[bhg481]

Yes OG - I took some cuttings from roses many years ago and got new plants from them. I think, because they are a "woody" plant, getting cuttings to root is not easy so grafting them onto briars is more reliable.

[homedeeth]

I dunno. I'm not a gardener by any means. I might just cut the whole thing down....again