I have a Himalayan rose I got from another gardener. It was just a 6" stick when I got it and the pic shows what it has become in maybe 6 years. It's so vigorous that given a couple of years to itself, it would consume my house. It is doing a magnificent display this year, but a bit much for my small garden. At the end of the season, should I cut off the whole superstructure down to maybe 3 or 4 feet of basic canes? I know it would recover from such a hard prune, but it would be a much smaller plant for a while. But maybe that's what it needs to prevent it from house consumption. In its favour, it fills the garden with a gorgeous scent. Downside is the huge canes it throws up during the growing season and the ferocious thorns.
As far as can be told from your rather distant photo it is the garden rose 'Paul's Himalayan Musk'. A 'Climbing Mme. Cecile Brunner' near me, which like your rose produces long arching new canes each spring, is confined to a quite small structure - that is otherwise not at all in scale with the mature size of the variety - is nevertheless kept within the space with shearing of the entire plant after flowering each year. So that it is left looking like a sort of topiary for a time. You should be able to do likewise with your plant. The key thing is to cut back far enough to prevent unwanted size development but not so far that continued flowering is prevented.
Thanks. I'm pretty sure Paul's Himalayan musk is the variety I have. The photo was to give a sense of how big the plant is in relation to the arbour and my small garden. By 'shearing' do you mean taking a hedge cutter to the upper growth just above the horizontal bar of the arbour. I'm not sure if I understand you properly.
This is growing wild in Hampshire England what appears to be Himalayan Rose. It is rampant along the side of the footpaths near us. It is cut back hard every couple of years, but seems to come back each June even stronger. IMO it should be grown only if you intend to be a regular and harsh pruner. On the plus side it is very pretty and fragrant with a mass of small blooms. Two photos taken in last couple of days attached. D
I saw it once in Scotland on an abandoned estate, climbing up and massing over a tall tree. It was spectacular. When I got the 6" stick, I didn't know what it was exactly and it's grown vigorously since. I now know it well and have been dealing with it ever since. I have a tall lopper to take down the huge, long canes and I have pruned it very hard in the past though I don't want to take it back quite so hard as the growth on top of the arbour provides some screening from a 2 storey house just over my fence. I am not an expert gardener and thought I'd ask if there was something more skilled I should be doing to control my beautiful, but a bit frightening beast. Its thorns are as bad as the ones you find on wild blackberry bushes which grow rampant here. They're probably closely related. I guess I will suit up and have a go at my rose bush once the blooms are finished.
Hi, tbh I do not believe there is a limit on cutting this back. Council workers use petrol hedge trimmers on this and cut it back so hard. And then it just comes right back full of flowers and vigor. Perhaps the secret is to not touch it, lol. But I wouldn't trust that. D
The rose in Hampshire is not 'Paul's Himalayan Musk', it is another garden variety of some kind. The rose near me gets sheared like it was a hedge or topiary, often enough to keep it from exploding out of the space. But not so often that it looks sheared at all times.
Ah, back to my original question. When you say sheared, what implement is used to do that? Btw, here's a closeup of mine.
