Pruning Roses
Please take time to read these words offered by my friend Lisa Renee Sayre. They should prove most useful on the ground you tend.
EGC
Pruning Roses: A Lenten Reflection
by Lisa Renee Sayre
Late winter to early spring is the best time to prune roses. It can seem cruel in the moment, as this means pruning just as new buds start to form. As you examine the branches and see nubs of new life straining the skin up and down each cane, you get a sense of the plant's potential. You see that every cut is six or a dozen new branches that won't come to be.
If you have been negligent in past prunings, however, you will also bear witness to the consequences of untended growth. Your study will reveal branch crossing branch tangled with branch in the middle of the bush. The new buds, if left to develop, will increase the chaos and crowding exponentially.
Pruning brings light and air to the center of the bush. Most guides advise pruning roses into the shape of a vase. Keep big strong branches that tend upward and outward. Remove any branches that head toward the middle, as well as any branch that crosses another. Injured, infested, infected or dead wood is cut down to the ground.
It is important not to be tender. Every cane on a rosebush wants to bud. The smallest, weakest, most misplaced branch wants to extend itself a dozen ways into ever increasing chaos. Unless you prune and preempt them, new generations of branches will keep growing inward, entangling and entwining until they choke themselves out, leaving the center of the bush both crowded and dead.
As much as every branch on the rosebush wants to bud and bear flowers, the plant as a whole cannot sustain unlimited growth and remain healthy. Instead, it is the skillful pruning of the gardener that helps the rose achieve a fuller potential. The more branches the gardener removes, the more the bush is encouraged to concentrate its energy in the remaining canes, filling them with healthy branches and healthy flowers. Pruning is a practical example of the paradoxical wisdom that less can often make for more.
A certain Gallilean rabbi once taught that plants are not the only things that need pruned.
We live in a culture in love with the much and the more, as our cluttered homes and busy lives attest. But like a rosebush, we need light and air to circulate to our very center, or we can choke ourselves out. On a collective level, Our American way of being prizes production so much that not only our houses but the planet is running out of room to put it all. This past year of pandemic has been the latest in a series of warnings that the global whole is out of balance. It is an invitation to pruning.
When pruning is needed -- and it will be on a regular and cyclical basis as new buds grow into branches that grow unruly -- the first step toward correction is an attentive study of the plant. Which branches tend upward and outward toward the light? Which are turned inward toward chaos and over competitive crowding? The second step is an act of courage, born of trust or lived experience or a bit of both, that each cut will bring a necessary breathing space and more abundant blooms.
Go forth and prune.
