Roses: First time planting a 15 gallon rose bush with prickles., 4 by DonnaMack

DonnaMack wrote:
I got two Quadra (Explorer climber) a few years ago. They were bareroot from Pickering, and the nice thing about Quadra is that the branches start off extremely flexible and soft as butter. So I could train them sideways easily, which I started doing tin the second year. They were also much smaller plants.

You have a bit of a dilemma in that what one normally does is allow the rose to grow a bit and then start training it sideways. It would have been preferable to train it from a lower level than is available with such a mature specimen. Have a look at the picture below. You want to get it as horizontal as possible, from as low a point as possible, as soon as possible.

This looks really wonky, but the effect you are going for is in the third and fourth pictures. This is two roses, by the way.

Don\'t use wires whatever you do. They will cut into the stems. I used the thicker tomato tape. You can see it in the pictures. It\'s flexible, yet strong, and has some \"give\" to allow the rose to expand a bit without getting cut.

I flinch to tell you this, but I think your rose is too tall to train without being cut back. You do have the alternative of just enjoying it as it is and cut it back next spring so that you can train it. Unless you have stems flexible enough to move them sideways.

If I had anticipated that they would do this, I would have warned you to ask for a smaller one. I suspect that the supplier was happy to offload this huge and beautiful but difficult to train specimen.

Donna