How to Prune Roses for More Blooms

As gardening season approaches, you may be wondering how to prune roses if you have these beautiful flowers in your own garden. Pruning regularly creates a vital plant and encourages new growth, removes old, dead wood, helps shape the plant, and reduces the chances of fungal disease by opening the rose plant up to airflow.

Pruning roses is a simple process, and there are only a few basic rules to follow to get more blooms and keep your plant healthy. Here's a guide on pruning roses including the right time to do so, how to do so, and more.

When to Prune Roses

The best time to prune roses is between late winter and early spring before blooms start showing. Make sure you're pruning roses once a year.

Timing your pruning is determined by the class of the rose plant and your hardiness zone. Once-blooming roses that bloom on old wood, for example, should be pruned after blooming, rather than before blooming.

When leaf buds on your plant begin to swell and take on a pink or reddish hue, it's time to prune. Timing it right is critical, as it's best to prune the plant before the buds break open and right after hard frosts have ended in your region. However, certain roses are finicky about pruning time and prefer to be cut back before breaking dormancy.

Where to Prune Roses

New roses should only be pruned lightly, during their first year, as this allows for the healthiest growth possible. The correct way to prune roses is to do so at a 45-degree angle above a bud eye, angling downward on the opposite side of the stem from the eye.

The most obvious areas to prune on rose bushes are the dead, woody remains of flowering stalks. These dead canes may have snapped under the weight of snow or simply succumbed to a harsh winter.

The less obvious canes to prune include those that are spindly or have shoots that extend well beyond your desired growing region. The ultimate goal is to maintain a "V" formation, or vase shape, between several, evenly spaced major canes that sprout from the ground.

Pruning Different Types of Roses

There are various types of roses, each one with different pruning specifications. Make sure you understand the particularities of your rose's variety before you prune.

• Once-blooming on new wood: Modern roses like hybrid tea, grandiflora, and floribundas bloom best on the current season's growth. Prune hard in the spring (1/2 to 2/3 of the plant's height) and remove all old woody stems. Create an open vase shape with the remaining canes by removing the center stems and any crossing branches. Leave three to five healthy canes evenly spaced around the plant, cut at various lengths, to encourage continuous blooming.
• Once-blooming on old wood: Ramblers like the "Malvern Hills" and "Snow Goose" rose must be pruned to remove winter damage and dead wood and shaped to keep their size in check. Ramblers bloom only once and can be pruned right after flowering, back to 2- to 3-inch canes. They quickly regrow, so you won't lose any flowers the following season.
• Repeat bloomers: Shrub rose bushes, like the Knock Out varieties and 'The Fairy', are repeat bloomers, flowering on mature—but not old—woody stems. Leave them unpruned to increase vigor in the first two years, and then remove 1/3 of the oldest canes and dead, diseased, or dying canes. Climbing roses, like the 'William Baffin' rose, may also repeat bloom. Prune this bush early to remove winter damage and deadwood. Prune again after flowering to shape the bush and keep its size in check. Remove old and weakened long canes, as needed.