Tying down climbers

18 years ago

We had a bad wind storm the other day and one of my climbers (Iceberg) which was on a woodlike plastic trellis ripped right off the front of my house. We had to remove it today and we removed one very large heavy cane from the rose.

We had planned to prune back both Iceberg and QE climber which are on either side of a garage window on the front of our house. We bought the wire, the jute twine and the eye hooks. Our plan is to string the wire from the corner of the house to the other side (there is a wood strip there which is convenient) and attach the canes to the wire with the jute twine. We saw this done in Biltmore against a stone wall and it looked great.

Has anyone done this? What was your experience? Would it be bad to intertwine the roses if their canes are long enough to over lap?

I'm also hoping to do this to the 4 climbers I have against a fence that have grown a lot this past summer and need to be trained. I'm using the American Hort book on pruning as my guide.

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Comments (3)

karl_bapst_rosenut
18 years ago
I don't think it's wise to intertwine climber canes. Best to tie them separately to whatever you're using to hold them up. Canes die, even in warmer growing areas. Trying to prune a dead cane that's intertwined with others, on a trellis, or growing on wires is near impossible without damaging others. We experience this quite often in colder growing areas where most climbers die back considerably each winter.
buford
Original Author
18 years ago
Thanks karl. We wound up cutting a lot more off of QE than I though. I wanted to take out the oldest cane and it was about half the plant :) But it needed to be done and it will be better in the long run.

Lesson learned, do this when you first plant the rose, not 5 years later.
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mendocino_rose
18 years ago
When we were in the south of England it seemed like every house had roses growing like this. It appeared that they kept them restrained, not growing too thickly. I think they prune pretty heavily and train carefully.