Roses seldom go fully dormant here - you need to help them along a bit :-) Allowing them to develop hips at the end of the season will give them the signal that it's time to stop producing buds and blooms. I tend to do some light pruning in fall as well - many modern roses as well as the antique types can put on a lot of growth during the growing season, so I cut them back enough to make sure long canes aren't blowing about in the wind and to get rid of buds that won't fully open now the weather's turned colder.

Defoliating them will also help to stimulate their period of dormancy and is an excellent idea if you've had fungal problems. Yes, it's a lot of work if you grow a lot of roses but that's the price you pay for healthy (or semi-healthy) roses in the northwest. Removing all the diseased foliage, both off the bush and from the ground and surrounding area, will limit the ability of fungal spores to overwinter. If the weather's mild, you may still get some regrowth of leaves, but it should still stop the plant from forming new flower buds and at least any new growth should be clean of disease. When I do my regular pruning in late winter/early spring, I remove what leaf growth has formed over winter as well to be doubly safe I haven't carried any disease problems over.

Roses in bloom at Christmas not unusual here.

Repeat blooming roses do not go dormant. The gene for repeat bloom comes from tropical evergreen roses from China and the tendency to be evergreen went along with it. They sure slow down in our winters but they don't go dormant.

Defoliating reduces disease carry over but does not make a rose without the genes for dormancy go dormant. We're not that powerful! I wait til most of the leaves have come off of their own accord - so long as they're green, and firmly attached, the rose is not done with them yet. Green leaves are still full of food that has not yet been transferred to the stems and roots.

My personal gardening philosophy is, why worry? I do what I can but there's so much we don't have power over and worry won't change that, it'll just tire me out. Roses still growing in November? so what? Tulips sprouting in December? well isn't that interesting, let's watch and see what they do next. Rhodies blooming in winter? Wow! extra color! That's my philosophy. Hey, it's not like you can change the weather, or make the plants stop and go back into the bud.

When the leaves start looking ratty I might pull them off, sometimes that's not til January. When I had 80 roses I did them bit by bit over the winter. The only deadline is to have them all off when spring pruning is done, and if you wait til you finish the pruning there's very few leaves left on the plant! just make sure you pick them up off the ground too. Blackspot overwinters on the canes too after all, and fallen leaves on the ground, not just the leaves still on the plant.

You do want to keep the moldy flower buds cut off. That's botrytis rot, and it can creep down into the stems and rot the stems too if not cut off.

Cutting stimulates growth. Why not stop all cutting, especially given that we're likely to have very cold temps soon and when the roses are dormant (Presidents Day weekend is traditional), then you can prune off everything that died.

Good luck!

Sue

It's a bit of stretch to say that repeat blooming roses don't go dormant. While modern roses, specifically hybrid teas, do have some evergreen parentage, multiple thousands of generations later and with continual diverse genetic input, that heritage is slight (btw, it is generally considered that the remontant characteristics of modern roses is due primarily to R. chinensis, which is neither tropical in origin or fully evergreen) and truly evergreen species roses tend to be a bit delicate and tender, preferring hotter climes than our own.

Plants from more temperate regions, which would include most modern roses and certainly hybrid teas, do go through a period of dormancy when metabolism changes and new growth slows dramatically or even halts. This is true for evergeen plants as well. Even rose growers in extremely mild climates, like southern California, recognize the advantage of this rest period of dormancy or semi-dormancy and encourage their roses to enter this state through the same practices described above. Disbudding, deadheading, allowing hip formation and removing foliage all contribute, together with colder temperatures and reduced day length, to stimulate the plants to enter this state.

A period of total or full dormancy like herbaceous perennials and most fully deciduous trees and shrubs experience is not really necessary and, often in our climate, difficult to achieve, but neither do you want the plant to expend unnecessary energy trying to produce new growth and flowers this late in the season. And if for no other reason, the removal of foliage both from the plant itself and from the ground and surrounding area will go a long way in reducing the overwintering of disease problems.