Why prune evergreen roses in spring?
For traditional remontant rosebushes, maintenance pruning should be carried out throughout the season, as well as a clean-up pruning in the autumn, which consists of cutting back all the branches to half height.
But at the beginning of the following spring, during the month of March, or even at the end of February, given that the rose is a plant that does not fear the cold, it is necessary to proceed with a rejuvenation pruning, which allows the rosebushes to remain dynamic and to produce a maximum of flowers. In fact, if you want to obtain new sap conduits that are well distributed throughout the plant, it is necessary to prune the old wood.
The right calculation before pruning
The first step in spring pruning is to count the number of branches on the rose. This number determines the number of eyes* (and therefore branches) to keep.
During a classic pruning, if we count 10 branches (2 small ones can count as one), we must keep 10 eyes on the rosebush. With the pruning technique, we keep 20. The calculation is the following : number of branches emitted in the year x 2 = number of eyes to keep on the rosebush.
Knowing that the first 12 centimeters of a branch carries 3 to 4 eyes, if we leave 5 branches cut back to 12 centimeters, we keep the 20 eyes desired.
Pruning the branches
To leave only 5 branches on the rosebush, we will first remove the branches located in the center, as close as possible to the base. Then, we cut back the preserved branches above the 4th eye.
Avoiding flowering holes
To avoid flowering holes during the season, it will be necessary to intervene again, but only after the roses have grown back. When the new branches reach 20 to 30 cm, 2 branches are selected and pruned to 3 eyes. Thus, when the rosebush is in bloom, these two branches will have produced 6 new branches which will, in turn, be filled with flower buds.
If we repeat this pruning on 10% of the branches, every 10 days, even if it means sacrificing a few flowering branches, we obtain a rosebush bearing roses permanently.
