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Judith's Corner - June, 2003
First: Pegging roses means that long, pliable, rose canes are bent to the ground and "pegged" to that spot with "gardening staples" (also used to hold down landscape fabric). You can peg rose canes to anything--tying canes along vertical lines of fencing accomplishes same effect, which is to encourage blooming along the length of the cane, rather than just at the end of the cane. Climbing roses lend themselves to horizontal lines, and horizontal canes bloom profusely. Shari pruned my four year old climbers to do two things--to spread horizontally along the structure they're growing against (fencing, and lattice trellis), and then to make use of the long canes at the "front" of each bush. She removed old growth, and selected for healthy pegging canes. The front canes were then carefully bent to the ground, and pegged to the dirt. The canes were bent and pegged in a full half-circle at the front of the bush--a sensational effect when in full bloom! I decided to use the same techniques on my Austrian Copper, which is also four years old and undersized (so far) because it's in too much shade. It isn't planted against anything. I just pegged its canes in a full circle around the bush. I'm crazy about this rose--I wish it bloomed more than once, or longer. I want every single bit of copper-glow and citrus scent I can get from this shrub, and I'd like to be able to control some of its wilder ways--this is not a tidy rose. Pegging, as it turns out, works very well on Austrian Coppers--I had gorgeous, prolonged bloom so I'm going to just keep pegging it as it grows I do prune the center of this shrub, but I'll only be in control of it for a couple of more years I don't think anyone bosses an Austrian Copper around. Pegging, however, is close. Pegging also takes up a lot of space. Along my fence line this wasn't an issue, but one of my climbers shares a spot with a lot of other plants as. I pegged the canes to the ground; I was literally laying the canes down across other smaller plants. I’ll be moving some of those smaller plants later this year, but right now I have roses blooming in the middle of bee balm, primrose, thyme, daisies, baby's breath, and verbena. Pretty, if a little unruly. I expected our dogs to break through some of the pegged canes, but that hasn't happened--I guess those thorns ARE a deterrent. However, some of the staples have loosened after watering, so I've had to do some creative re-pegging. Wind, which has battered everything else, hasn't loosened the pins--go figure! When it came time to apply a systemic, I was a little flummoxed. It is supposed to be spread at the drip-line of the rose, which was a lot easier to delineate before pegging. All those bent canes created an entirely new set of drip-lines, so I had to study each shrub before I decided where to put the systemic. Nothing burned, so I guess I didn't do any harm. Some of the new growth has become long enough to be pegged themselves. I've had more than double--maybe quadruple--the bloom I've had in previous years. .It's stunning! I'm hoping that the Fourth of July will be in bloom for our Rose Tour in September, but we won't be able to see the Austrian Copper bloom again until next year—maybe a short tour in the spring? Shari told me that one of the effects of pegging can be air-layering at the point of pegging--she said I could get whole new roses shrubs propagating at the pegging point. I'll let you know if that happens--I might have baby Fourth of July available for adoption!
Back to Judith's Corner This page last modified: November 22, 2003 |
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As I've bragged previously, my
Fourth of July climbers were given some personal attention from Shari
Daly-Miller earlier this year, so I have "pegged" climbing roses in my back
yard. I had a picture in my mind of the results of this effort which was quite
fabulously fulfilled but I had no idea just how involved this whole pegging
process was.