I’ve posted on GardenWeb’s rose forum, asking for help with my Pink Simplicity rose hedge. These roses never bloom as well as I think they should, and I’ve been working on getting them the right fertilizer and making sure they’re watered correctly, etc. Here are two photos from late last July, when they flowered at their best. If they were this good for a long season, I might like them, but even this isn’t as good as they should be. I don’t get any good spring flush of blooms from them, and they don’t last long enough when they do bloom in the summer.
Here’s my last post on that thread at GW, summarizing what I learned about why these roses lose their buds early in the season:
[There was a discussion about how this is a self-cleaning rose and how that may be the reason for the buds falling off prematurely. I was trying to figure out what self-cleaning actually meant]
Looking last night at my one shrub that has been blooming well, some of the older spent flowers have stems that are drying out (they’re about 3″ long). If I wiggle them just a little, they fall off at the base of the stem. So, I suppose that’s what self-cleaning means, and YES, this seems like the answer to my problem.
These self-cleaning roses have a joint at the base of the stem that will separate from the branch a number of days after the rose is done blooming. My little rosebuds appear to be separating right at that joint but they’re so small they haven’t even developed any stem length yet.
As Karl said, my non-self-cleaning roses won’t be affected like this, and they’re not. They bloom just fine. And I do live in a place with nearly no humidity when it isn’t raining, so that dry air probably adds to or creates this problem.
So, the final conclusion of this long, long thread (thank you again everyone) is that I’ll be giving them more water and probably a foliar fertilizer early in the season — as soon as they leaf out — to try to avoid whatever deficiency these plants have that is making them abort their spring flush.
By the way, I’m finally starting to get a summer flush of blooms, and it looks like it’s going to be pretty good. The shrubs are way too tall (6-7′, since I never pruned them this spring while trying to figure out what I was doing wrong), which makes them look a bit funny, but I won’t be cutting them back until after this flush.