Pruning the Roses

It's that time of year again: time to prune the roses, so I dug out my gloves and secateurs yesterday and hacked away! Last year (my first year) I left it too late. By all accounts you're not supposed to prune when new growth has already started, so I wasn't able to do much except tidy off some old dead branches. That's why the roses still look so tangled and out-of-control this year! I used instructions from here with diagrams from here as my guide.

The roses in the side garden, before:

and after:

Before:

And after:

The rose at the front next to the garage, after:

I don't seem to have a before, oops, but I didn't chop much off this one. As you can see, it never died back over Winter, so I was worried about chopping too much off. It's interesting that each rose bush is different. Each one grew at different rates, started and finished flowering at different times, and died back to different degrees once the weather turned.

I didn't prune this poor fellow at all except for cutting off a few tiny dead twigs. It had a bad case of black spot over the Summer and didn't grow at all, so I let him be.

I'm very pleased to see lots of new buds growing very strongly on it, though:

Just as I was packing up, it started pouring rain and this amazing double rainbow appeared! You can't see the second one very well in the photo, but it's coming up from behind the power pole.

The double effect had gone away by the time I took the second one, but it's so bright! I stayed outside for a little while under the porch, watching and listening to the rain falling onto the plants in the garden. At times like these, I can almost feel their joy at soaking in the rain, the heat of summer just a distant memory. Morning sun and afternoon rain -- it's perfect.