Yes, remove the black pots. It will get quite hot under there with the sun so high now.

Prune out the dead material and leave the rest. Don't worry too much about pruning. It's nice to do but not critical. Once the plants get bigger and more established and you learn more about pruning, then you can think about it.

fillagirl

I'm fairly new to roses also, but I don't think you even needed to cover your Winnipeg Parks and William Baffin roses.

I'm certain the William Baffin is a very hardy one, and the word Winnipeg in the other tells me it might be very hardy also.

If you do a search on this forum, you'll find there's quite a few people in the colder zones that grow a lot of roses, and you can probably read the posts until "the cows come home", LOL!

You can uncover them now. William Baffin should be completely cane hardy through most winters, Winnipeg Parks is a little more tender. For me it's hardy to the snow line so I do put a bit of leaves around it just in case it's a bad year for exposure. It is vigorous and will grow to a nice size quickly if it has died back.

I leave the pruning until the new growth is a few inches long to see what's really dead.

For the first winter or two, it can help even hardy roses to mulch the crown.

You might want to give them some shade for awhile. If they have been under black pots since last October they won't have seen any light in half a year, so suddenly popping them into bright sunshine might cause sunscald.

I took the cardboard boxes off my roses yesterday. Most fared quite well over the winter, but JP Connell lost a couple of nice canes - they were broken, probably because of the snow load. Topaz Jewel has little red buds already, and so does Henry Kelsey.