Believe it or not, I almost threw this rose bush out for dead a short while ago. After setting it in the front yard last year, the plant really seemed to struggle. It produced one small rose (its only one to date), wilted away, and refused to grow. By late Summer, I decided that maybe its location was the problem and replanted it in a container. Yet in its new container home, and despite ample doses of rose food and rose mulch, the plant continued to weaken.
While our other roses grew rapidly and produced numerous blooms early this year, this one plodded along without even the hint of a bud and very few leaves. Then, one day I noticed a new stem sprouting beside the old one. Within a week the stem was over a foot tall. Then, in a little over a month, it raced upward to its present six and a half feet! It grew so fast and tall that I had to train it around a couple of bamboo poles to keep it upright. Now, two additional stems have sprouted and are growing as quickly as the first. Maybe I should cut it back, but I think I'll just wait a while and see how tall it will grow....
3 comments:
Did the stems that shot up come from below the graft? It sounds like you have a wild rose stem. Most hybrids are grafted onto old wild rose rootstock. The wild stems will grow like a weed.
Hi Perennial Gardener. It came up from out of the dirt, about an inch away from the main stem.
Hello John. Yeah that is definitely a wild rose. My hybrid climbers are the worse for this, but I have a tendency to cut those off they eventually will kill out the hybrid completely.
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