By Nancy Wilson, U. C. Master Gardener

After the holidays, your garden is dormant and damp, with lots of dead leaves, mushy perennials and dead annuals. It's not a very enticing environment for gardeners, but your roses are calling. They are ready for pruning.

Begin in mid-January so that you can complete the task by mid-February. Start now because you may have to work around the rainy weather.

The first job is cleaning and sharpening all your tools. Warm water, a little dish soap and a green scrub pad are enough to dislodge most dirt and rust. Dry the blades thoroughly and spray them lightly with WD-40.

Use a sharpening stone on the blades, pushing in one direction, away from the handles, only on one side of the blade. You want to keep a sharp edge on the blades so the work of pruning goes quickly and all the cuts are clean. It is important to keep your pruning blades clean so you do not pass disease from one plant to the next, so you may want to repeat the cleaning process as you finish each bush.

Before you make the first cut, walk your garden and see what has happened since you left the garden last fall. When you have assessed the situation, ask yourself a few questions. How did your pruning work out last year? Did your plants grow in the way you anticipated? Did you have lots of flowers? What do you want to change?

For me, this year, the questions and answers are very important. My garden will be on the Napa County Master Gardeners' Garden Tour on Sunday, June 3. I know that I want my garden to look healthy and full of beautiful roses on that date.

Pruning is critical to assuring a bountiful show of blooms. Pruning signals the plant to produce the canes and leaves that will support the flowers we want all year. My garden has many hybrid tea roses as well as floribundas, grandifloras, polyanthas, David Austin shrub roses, and many old garden rose varieties, such as chinas, teas, noisettes, hybrid perpetuals and bourbons. Each variety needs a slightly different kind of pruning to make them produce as many blooms as possible.

You probably do not have to worry about so many different kinds. Contrary to what is often published in the books, roses in the Napa Valley usually need less pruning, rather than more.

Look carefully at each bush before you begin pruning. You want to remove any dead or diseased canes. You want to remove any interior canes that are crossing or rubbing each other. And you want to reduce the growth by about one third to one half.
Old rose varieties and some modern shrubs simply need a haircut and some thinning. Other types that bloom only once in the spring or early summer cannot be pruned until after bloom. Read about your roses or keep a journal of their habits, so you will know how to prune appropriately.

You want to make clean cuts about 1/4 inch above an outward facing bud eye. The

cuts can be straight or slanted at about 45 degrees. A sharper angle could damage the growing area around the bud that will produce this year's cane.

All your rose bushes need to have last year's foliage (every last leaf!) taken off the canes and removed from the ground underneath. Dispose of all rose cuttings and leaves in your garden waste bin, or take the debris to the land fill. Do not compost any of the trimmings.

Now is also the time to plant bare-root roses and apply a dormant spray to your newly pruned roses, if that is part of your gardening routine. Talk with your nursery personnel about a combination of lime-sulfur dormant spray and Volck oil. Personally, I do not spray. I try to practice good housekeeping and let nature take its course. You can visit my garden next June and check the results.

Many of our local nurseries offer rose pruning seminars. Check local newspapers for times and locations. Napa County Master Gardeners can also answer your rose-related questions or send you detailed pruning instructions. (See office hours, phone number and e-mail address below.) Watch this space for another article about rose care and feeding in March.

For information about the Napa County Master Gardeners' 2007 garden tour and a printable ticket form, visit http://cenapa.ucdavis.edu (click on Master Gardener).