I've almost completed the story of my first winter in the job that established my career. I was blundering about with an unearned confidence, secure in the knowledge that even if I was making a terrible mistake, nobody would really know. If I pursued my duties with enough elan, it would be assumed that I had sufficient experience to justify such bravado, and, as long as it all worked out right, the end would justify the means. I was probably a trifle optimistic, because tacit disapproval could be read in the countenances of my colleagues on occasion. On most occasions, if truth were told, although eventually sheer brass neck won the day, when everything turned out well. I still don't know how I managed that. The picture above is five years on from the tale I am about to tell.
The only other major horticultural task I tackled that first winter was the pruning of the shrub roses. What a pig of a job. We had huge borders of these, one of about 150 sq.m., consisting of nothing but old-fashioned shrub roses, another of at least twice that, where the plantings were mixed shrubs and herbaceous, but where roses were the main feature. In addition, the rest of the garden also had a considerable number of old roses dotted through the shrub beds. Buy yourself a pruning manual. I dare you. Take it at face value. Here you will learn the incontrovertible rules for rose pruning. It's quite simple, really. As long as you know what group your rose falls into. There are established systems for Species Roses, other ones for Old Garden Roses. These latter can be divided into sub-groups. As long as you know if your plant is an Alba, a Damask, a Moss or a Provence, then you will be able to read up on how to treat it. Alternatively, it might be a Bourbon, a China or a Portland, in which case you will have to learn another method. Should it be a Gallica, then that is different again. Then you might find a Hybrid Musk tucked in amongst the others. That has its own set of instructions. Rugosas too. God help you if you also have Modern Shrub types. Or Creeping Ramblers. Naturally, these are different from ordinary Ramblers, which in turn are not the same as Climbers (these two classes differ from one another in an important way which does affect the way they need to be pruned, so I advise you pay attention here). As for modern border Roses, there are the Large-Flowered Bush Roses (or Hybrid Teas), which are not the same as the Cluster-Flowered Bush Roses (Floribundas). And of course, nowadays you get the category of English Roses. Add in to all this the various refinements for training Roses up pillars, over arches, on rope swags, or pegged down to the ground in Victorian style, and you have a recipe for confusion that will have you reeling.
As for me, I don't even particularly like roses, and even though I had had a substantial number of old-fashioned types in my previous job, I hadn't had to immerse myself in their culture, as I had left before they needed much work. No, Old Roses are a pain in the neck in more ways than one. They tend to be more disease-prone than modern varieties which have been bred for health and vigour. To stop them turning grey from mildew, or defoliating themselves from blackspot, we had to resort to fungicidal sprays. That was fundamentally against my environmental aims, but seemingly unavoidable at the time. On the other hand, we never used insecticides, preferring to encourage the natural predators. As a consequence we had a garden full of wasps, and ladybirds used to overwinter in my beard. The place would be buzzing with hoverflies as a result of our no insecticide policy. The sight of a hoverfly gives me shivers of pleasure still. If I hadn't been a gardener, I think I would have liked to study entomology. I love shield bugs, and curiosities such as the Humming-bird Hawk Moth which used to visit us. The dragonflies and damsel-flies flitting across the pond too, were a delight. A garden is about so much more than flowers. I digress. The point is that old-fashioned roses are not particularly environmentally friendly if you want to grow them well, and the mythology surrounding the pruning regime is so convoluted as to make even the most intrepid want to give up. I think garden writers want to create a sense of mystery that only the initiated can penetrate, to keep their professional aloofness, and make them indispensable, so that the money keeps coming in. I hope that what I am writing serves to demythologise the whole shebang, and shows us professionals up to be pompous poseurs with a superiority or narcissistic personality complex that could lead to a Presidency one day.
In the end, I took a long look at the task before me, saw that none of the roses seemed to be thriving, deduced that no particular pattern had been applied in the previous fifty years, and set my own blanket rule for getting us out of the mire. I applied the technique of renewal pruning to everything. I would take out the oldest stems right to ground level, leaving younger, more vigorous ones to do the flowering the following year. As usual, I would be mindful of the scale of the border as a whole, and the need to get a sense of movement through it, which I termed ebb and flow, and I selectively reduced some of the shrubs to create this. Always I left an open centre, and pruned to a bud facing in a direction which would enhance the natural shape of the bush. Mostly this would be an outward-facing one, but that was by no means a hard and fast rule. Ramblers on tripods would be treated as they should,cutting out all the strong stems that had flowered this year, and tying in the summer's fresh whippy growth to flower once the following summer. Climbers are different, and apart from removing some very old stems, the idea was to keep an established framework and prune back the sideshoots that emerged from this. On these the flowers would form the following summer. Hybrid Teas and Floribundas are common enough for most people to know what to do with them, but judging by the looks I got, my approach was considerably more severe than anything that had been seen in the garden for a very long time, and possibly ever.
Some early photographs like the above show that there was still a long way to go. There was always the possibility, of course, that these plants were beyond redemption, having been in situ for up to 50 years. That was a decision we came to much further down the line, the year I left, in fact. There will be examples of that to show tomorrow. Not all of it looked as sparse as this, however, and some parts of the borders were quite full, even after the depredations of my pruning.
Roses, then, a continuing story. I will tell you more in my next instalment. Unless I go somewhere else entirely.
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