Yes, forever.

Jackie

And, just like America's Got Talent, you have your three "yes" votes.

Tea Roses do it all the time. So do Chinas.

Paul Zimmerman has some excellent YouTube videos on training/pruning climbing roses. Explains lateral canes very well. I found them very helpful for my ‘future’ climbers...

I was going to suggest the Paul Zimmerman videos. Thanks to him, I know what a bud eye, basal, and everything else is. It's still hard for me to actually keep the things alive, but I know the parts, and how it should work. :-p Some articles I had found online by "rose experts" had me growing a yard of Dr huey the first year I tried roses. "iT's nOrMaL for a rose to look like dead sticks when you plant it." NO it really wasn't. lol

Some roses grow new canes only from the root crown, and some grow canes from canes. It is important to know which kind you have when you are pruning. I would agree that Paul Zimmerman's pruning videos are very informative, and I recommend them when I give talks on rose care.

Reviving this thread. My husband "weeded" my new Kiss Me Kate last summer after she had been in the ground for about 3 months - there was almost nothing left. I cried. After a week or two she threw out what became a ginormous basal cane. She is looking healthy and leafy this spring - but again only the one cane. I trained it horizontally and have 7 or 8 laterals growing up, only one with a bud (so far). They are all getting pretty tall - can I train them horizontally as well? That is get laterals (and blooms) from laterals? Again, she currently has only the one cane....

Yes it's common to bend the main cane one side and horizontally train the laterals on the other side.

@Feiy (PNWZ8b/9a) Thank you! Am hoping for a few more basal canes to come in but will take what I can get. ;)

You can (sometimes) stimulate the growth of basal canes with some judicious nicking of the cane above a low bud node. Make an incision through the outer cambium layer, removing a 2-3mm wide strip, which semi-girdles the cane (I aim to nick around a third of the diameter)> This can be useful with old and gnarly trunks.

I have been (hard) pruning my old and tortured ramblers - a bloody (and sweary) job involving crawling under the thorny undergrowth to cut out several basals...which are massive, 20foot+ long behemoths. A brutal job.

Wow - sounds like a big job! Getting harder for me to crawl around in the dirt these days as well. Would you share a photo if you do any basal cane nicks?

You can achieve the same thing - new basal caning - by the routine application of alfalfa meal or alfalfa tea. Alfalfa contains concentrations of a natural plant growth hormone that stimulates this sort of growth. No cane nicking required!!

Liz - so glad your KMK is recuperating! Just a thought - whenever I plant a new baby rose in our garden, I put some sort of cage around it to save it from the deer, our overly enthusiastic gardener, and my DH! I take the cage off when the rose has attained a 4-5 ft height.

Jackie

@jacqueline9CA I have noticed that someone has been nibbling on the new growth of my second year Beverlys! I just scratched some Deer Out into the ground and pots around my all my roses last weekend.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08lk4lg Here is a short video demonstrating 'notching' a shrub to disrupt apical dominance and encourage new basal breaks. There are always different ways to get a similar effect...nutrient additions, enzymes and hormones, bending to disrupt sap flow and diminish apical dominance, can all increase the likelihood of basal breaks...but when a rose is aged and gnarly, especially if it has been reduced to a single one cane wonder, physiologically affecting the rose by notching above a bud node can be very effective.

With ramblers, the best way of stimulating basal growth is to sacrifice a couple of older canes, by cutting them back from the base - guaranteed to produce new shoots. Notching is a less dramatic way of altering plant behaviour and can be a useful addition to the gardener's toolbox.

There is no shortage of basals coming from my vasty ramblers so I am definitely not deliberately increasing basal growth, Liz - if anything, I am trying to find a balance between removal of numerous old canes, without stimulating a huge burst of future growth. As my old horticultural teacher told me, on many occasions - 'Growth follows the knife' (although this little aphorism should be attributed to the late, great Fred Loads).

For quite a few years, I practically gave up attempting to stay on top of pruning my old, enormous rambling roses. This year, with the help of a new chainsaw (and desperation) I have pruned most of the roses harder than I have ever before attempted. It is somewhat terrifying because I have no idea how the roses are going to respond. I had no choice but to make an attempt since my whole allotment was turning into a Sleeping Beauty impassable briar jungle. Children and animals were at risk of vanishing and blood was shed with every trip up and down the plot. I promise to post up the results - at present, I have been able to get to paths I have not used for over a decade...and plants I forgot I had (various herbaceous clematis, for example), have appeared from underneath vast thickets of thorny caneage.

@rosaprimula UK (Cambridge) Z8/9 Wow! Thank you for the video link - but now I also have a wonderful mental image of your overgrown but enchanted garden. We will need photos of it as well; of the hard prune, of the long forgotten undergowth plants - and of the spring results!