Climbing Roses

Every winter a climbing rose spends a few months as a bundle of bare, prickly sticks tied to a wall. Then, one morning in early summer, it opens a flower at the height of your nose, over the gate or by the bedroom window, without your having to kneel on the lawn at all. A patch of soil the size of a doormat can, in a few years, clothe a wall several metres high. This book shows you how to get there.

Climbing and rambling roses have a reputation for being complicated, and most of it comes from treating two different plants as one. A climber usually repeat-flowers and is pruned in winter; a rambler usually flowers once and is pruned after flowering. Start with that question and the rest falls into place: where to plant, when to prune, how hard, and whether to deadhead or leave the flowers for hips. From there the book follows the jobs in the order you’ll meet them, from choosing and buying to training, pruning and keeping a rose healthy for years.

What you’ll find inside

• How to tell a climber from a rambler, including the exceptions, and how to read a rose label
• Choosing for the place: walls by aspect, fences, arches, pergolas, pillars, obelisks, pots and trees
• Buying bare-root, containerised and container-grown roses, and how deep to set the graft union
• Putting up wires, trellis and other supports, with ladder safety
• Training stems towards the horizontal for more flowers, and tying in through the year
• Pruning climbers and ramblers, a chapter each, including renovating an old, tangled plant
• Watering, feeding and mulching, deadheading, hips and growing climbers in containers
• Black spot, powdery mildew, rust, aphids and other troubles, tackled without a cupboard full of sprays
• Rose replant disease, moving an established rose, and propagating from cuttings and layers
• Profiles of more than forty named climbers and ramblers, grouped for shady walls, sunny walls, small spaces, big trees, and hot or cold climates

Who it’s for

If you have never pruned a rose, start at the beginning: every term is explained as it appears, and the steps are set out in order. If you have grown roses for years, you’ll find the places where reliable advice genuinely differs, on pruning dates, planting depth and soil fungi among them, laid out fairly side by side.

Give it two or three years, a few good ties and a pair of sharp secateurs, and the rose will do most of the rest.