Growing Climbing Roses

Experienced and professional gardeners describe climbing roses as ramblers, pillars, trailing roses and everblooming.  In order to showcase your talents as a rose gardener...

you need climbing roses as part of your rose garden landscape plan.  Many varieties bloom during the entire growing season, while others may only bloom in the spring.  The spring bloomers are referred to as the name suggests, spring bloomers.

A unique characteristic of climbing roses is they require a support structure in order to flourish.  This makes them an ideal adornment for archways, fences, gazebos and other decorative structures throughout the garden.  Nonetheless, climbing roses are not really vines.  They require a little intervention to ensure they wind their way in and throughout the supporting structure you want them to adhere to.  Just loosely attach the vine to the structure and help it along from time to time.  And in no time you’ll have a beautifully decorated awning, trellis or fence cover.

Trellis’, railings, arbors, walls or mostly any other solid structures make excellent surfaces for climbing roses. You’ll also discover the ideal growing direction is laterally as opposed to vertical.  From my experience you’ll get more blooms along the main stem and canes when you thread them laterally.  

Climbing roses can grow from 25 to 30 feet tall.  Popular varieties for such magnificent growth include the Climbing Cecile Brunner and the Westerland rose.  Given the right conditions, such as sunny warm conditions, six to seven hours of unfiltered sunlight per day, you might even be able to exceed these average lengths.  Partially shaded climbing roses do well in as little as five to six hours a day of direct sunlight. 

Climbing roses are categorized a number of ways.  Generally, if you talk to you r local rose horticulturalists, they’re all familiar with the following more popular groupings:

-        Climbing Floribundas

-        Climbing Grandifloras

-        Climbing Hybrid Teas

-        Climbing Polyanthas

-        Climbing Tea Roses

Next, consider the height you anticipate your climbing roses will grow.  You can determine this based on the varieties mentioned above, using about thirty feet as the norm.  However, many species, given the proper lighting conditions, care and feeding may reach up to seven or more feet.  Primary considerations to maximize your climbing rose length are:

1.      Size of your garden

2.      Sunlight exposure

3.      Soil conditions

4.      Structure you plan to adorn with your roses

5.      Local climate conditions

6.      Frequency and color of blooms for that variety

7.      Size and height of the plant

Although this seems like a rather long list of considerations, there is nothing more disheartening than having to thin your roses or curtail their growth because of inadequately planned conditions.  Just be realistic during your planning and you can achieve the desired outcome. 

However intriguing the pictures or thoughts of having an expansive 40- foot clustering of radiant rose blossoms may be, you may need to simply enjoy the  more alluring cluster of vibrant, stunning roses suitable to the existing environment.

Roses in general require a fair amount of pruning.  But your climbing roses don’t even require trimming the first two years.  Pruning your climbing roses two early and too often will result in fewer blooms.

Professional gardeners advise pruning at three to four year intervals.  Even then, this only involves eliminating small canes, older canes and less vigorous canes located near the base of the plant.  This encourages the young canes to grow unimpeded, rendering them into long flexible runners.  They’re also easier to tame and thread through structures. 

Keep in mind that climbing roses bloom either once in the spring, or throughout the whole growing season. Be patient.  They’ll take a while to get established, but when they start to bloom, the rose garden you imagined is just around the corner. Once established, in the right conditions, with proper care and maintenance the beauty, colors and fragrances you expected are worth all the effort and patience.