rambling rose

Today I had another chop at the rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk'.  It is supposed to be growing up the wild gean by the septic tank, but while quite a large portion of it does just that, there is still plenty that spills out over the potted witch hazels on the far deck, and blocks the steps to the lower lawn. Hamamelis do not like being enveloped by other dense vegetation, and if you allow their branches to be smothered for any length of time, you will probably find they have died back before you got round to dealing with the situation.

I object strongly to the steps being blocked, though not as emphatically and fatally as the witch hazels object to the rose's encroachments.  A key part of good garden layout is the circulation, and without use of the steps, the lower part of the garden ceases to lie on a circular route and becomes a cul de sac, making it less satisfying to walk around, while requiring a tedious detour if you want to get the the corner of the garden at the bottom of the steps.  I decided it was time to liberate steps and potted shrubs both.

It is partly my own fault that the usable width of the steps has shrunk year by year.  'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is a vigorous rambler, and rather than methodically cut off every long, waving stem that dared grow in the wrong direction, I have tried to flick them back into the tree and weave them round until they are pointing the right way.  Even when their tips did consent to continue growing towards the gean instead of away from it, the middle sections of the stems bulged sideways.  This in turn made them more of a fiddle to cut out, since I had to extract the ends of the branches out of the great central mass of rose stems while trying not to pull even more branches out over the decking.

The other reason why the rose was sprawling so far on to the deck was that the trunk of a hazel tree that some of it was climbing up had collapsed.  Looking at the apparently fat and healthy buds on the hazel, as far as I could tell it was not dead or split, but had merely slumped.  I sawed off its upper portions, where they hung out over the witch hazels, but had to leave some of it to avoid releasing a tidal wave of even more rose.  I am hoping that as the rose sends out further long shoots this summer, that some of them will manage to hook themselves into the gean and hold up the parts currently resting on the hazel.

Some books and gardening articles blithely assert that if you plant a rambling rose on the downwind side of a tree, it will blow into the crown of the tree.  In my experience the rose has plenty of ideas of its own, and is only distantly influenced by the wind.  If anything it wants to grow towards the light, and where is it lightest?  Away from the tree, that's where it wants to grow.  Until I began experimenting with roses in trees for myself I had not grasped quite how much growth a large rambler will throw out in a single season, and how ruthless you need to be about removing the parts that are growing in the wrong direction.