The combination of a finite plot and roses heading to infinity and beyond is a frustrating one. Personally, I don't move large, well-rooted plants, it seems unimaginably hard, but I have a lot of space, and can afford to walk past uncorrectable mistakes, looking the other way, which isn't your case I suppose. Is it possible to cut to the ground the roses you want to get rid of, and just have them die? I've eliminated big dog roses that way, perhaps after a couple of years of the treatment.

When our roses outgrow their spaces, we put up a pergola and train them onto it, sloppily I admit, and walk under them. Might this be a possibility for you?

By the way, I understand you have a problem, but I rather envy how well it sounds like your roses grow. Good luck!

Oh, one last thing, if 'Darlow's Enigma' is thorned like my nameless musk rambler, then you have my sympathies! That one is a monster to prune!

Um, yes, roses do seem to enjoy my plot...so much so that they appear immortal. I regularly cut an immense arvensis rose to the ground...and get around 2 months of space before skeins of whipping growth are attacking my ankles and knees. I suspect I will have to actually drill them and use glyphosate plugs. It does go against the grain - deliberate murder of perfectly healthy plants, especially since I appear to have no problems killing off hundreds of innocent and desirable seedlings - none of which will ever lash out at me with thorny stabbing branches. Not just the roses either. A single cistus now occupies around 12m2 (at least!).

All much complicated by this years rulings of no bonfires. Obviously, I am going to totally ignore this rule since the pruning mountain is now taking up the entire back half of the plot (and all the flower and veg beds). I have a bad name anyway, for having the largest plot (from back when large plots were normal) and having the temerity to grow flowers instead of vegetables.. Thankfully, our site is too small to have spawned a level of bureaucracy so has remained fairly anarchic but there are always a few evangelists and jobsworths. Pffft - muttered moaning on the Facebook site (which I am not on) is the least of my worries.

Darlows E is by no means the worst - that honour must go to a simply immense Scharlachglut...although Jasmina is also a bit terrifying, while Leontine Gervaise is definitely going on the kill list for crimes against flesh.

I will say, Melissa, the site is flat. If I had to contend with topography as well (as everything else), I would have thrown in the towel and taken up bird-watching instead.

If we are sharing tales of woe - after many years of peaceful, and cooperative coexistence, the town highway department has decided that my overgrown, untended fence bed must be sheared back by their mowers twice a year. Since the posts holding up the split rails are rotting, and should be replaced, I've decided the best course of action is to erect a new fence several feet further from the road. I've also decided that the species setigera that has taken over the entire bed must be destroyed. Setigera tips roots like nothing I've ever seen. So the original one plant at the shady end of the bed has travelled up the entire 40 ft of bed, rooting along the way. Last fall I dug up the small ones. I have no intention of digging up the big ones. Hopefully, I'll be able to cut them down far enough that the lawnmower can roll over the stumps, and automatically cut off any new growth. Hopefully.

Since we are no longer allowed to burn, and have little household garbage, the clippings go in the trash. Unfortunately, in more ways than one, the bin is currently full of RRD infected multiflora, so there is no room for setigera. At least I'm willing to start moving the peonies in that bed. Then I'll have to figure out when I can move the miscanthus and pennisetum. They don't like being moved in spring or fall, so there is a brief window between the time they have started growing, and the time it is too late for them to establish before the heat arrives. At least the bed is reasonably free of poison ivy.

I always say that the problems in our garden are NOT that plants won't grow, but that they grow too much! "Growth follows the knife" is one old English saying about roses that is TRUE.

Now that we have had to take down four 3 story high roses (and two others that were only 2 stories high) off our house (local wildfire regs), I no longer have the house to use to take up the rampant growth of climbers. We have shifted to metal structures of all kinds way further away from the house, as well as trees, of course, and only keeping the climbers I am especially fond of. In my new garden the plantings are all 1 year old or older, and I am watching them with some trepidation, to see what they do.

Jackie