A pruning quote

I received roses today from Style. A leaflet with them stated the following quote.......

Pruning.......'This is not a complicated area as many think, excellent results have been achieved using only hedge trimmers by the Royal National Rose Society'

So where does this leave us? I read recently that sharp secateurs should always be used and the blades cleaned in between each cut. The above statement makes a complete mockery of this.

I don't think I could ever take hedge trimmers to my roses, how do other members feel about it?

 

Exactly what I was thinking Armandii. Picturing this idea in my mind, I keep seeing the mashed up hedgerows along our roads after the mechanical hedgecutters have been at them. Which reminds me.......I need to invest in some new secateurs!

 

No way i would take hedge trimmer to any of my babies not even the nettles x

 

Perish the thought Joolz! I'd like to see Woo's comments and I'm sure he will oblige.

 

Those ripped edges to the hedgerows look terrible, don't they? But by next May they will be totally invisible and the plants will be growing away happily. Probably your roses would be the same.

If you have a lot of roses with a lot of ailments then clean secateurs would help prevent infection spreading. But for a small scale garden with just a few roses I don't think it would matter too much.

 

The hedgerows re-shoot naturally Madahhlia, but roses have to be pruned carefully to produce the right growth in the right directions, it's not possible to achieve this with hedgetrimmers, let alone them being left mangled! That's the difference I suppose between our manicured gardens and nature.

 

Well, I'm going to fly against the wind on this one.

I have a dark red rose, clusters of flowers heads, under my kitchen window and it's a prolific little fellow. I would happily turn the hedge trimmers on him just to keep his thorny exuberance under control! Handsome he may be; stealth attacker? For sure!

 

i thaught easy care was just cutting rose down to half its height with secateurs. I didnt realise it was with hedge trimmers poor babies

 

I thought I read about a trial somewhere, where they did half the field acording to the book and the other half by some tractor driven trimmer thingy - the result - no difference. They all looked just as good come the summer.

 

I've heard this as well, not sure if it's apocryphal or not.

The point is, roses look their neatest and best when hand pruned, and yes, mostly we prefer the buds to all face the right way, and the stems not be tangled up, but if those things are not done they flower pretty much as well anyway. It's actually quite hard to kill a rose by faulty pruning and mine get diseases no matter how carefully I do it, so I'd go with the National rose Society.