February 14, 2022
Valentine’s Day: get out the clippers.
Washington, DC is graced with a long, soft fall, swerving briefly into winter in January before careening between tempting spring warmth and unnerving cold for a few months, detouring through weeks of rainstorms before nose-diving into swampy summer humidity. So, not necessarily your ideal rose weather. (“The long, dry summers and wet winters that mark Mediterranean regions make favorable conditions for growing roses.” – SF Gate. Mediterranean, we are not.
Some years by Valentine’s Day, through the worst of whatever winter weather this Southern-ish city can muster up, my rose bushes are still covered in foliage. No cold means they never get a break. But this year, our several fulsome snowfalls provided a distinct interlude of dormancy. Roses, bears, people: we need time when nothing productive happens, at least externally, and we can gather our wits about us for the battle ahead. Call it dormancy, hibernation, or sabbath–we all need rest. Winter is a critical time for roses to stop the show, put energy into roots and regrowth instead of spending it so lavishly on the flowers that, at least in my garden, will only be clipped for bouquets and not converted to seed to generate new plants, all flowers’ ultimate purpose and desire. Plants are always driving towards making the next generation. It’s expensive, from an energy perspective. Winter provides a respite: it’s too darn cold.
Like people (I can’t speak for bears), roses aren’t always happy with this plan. Growth is, in the words of my five-year-old caught sticking his finger in the salt bowl “just too tempting.” As some gardening guidance warns, “Your rose is going to try a few tricks to keep awake. Even with hips developing, the rose may start looking frowsy and then put out a bit of new growth. She wants you to transplant her or take her out of a pot and give her more room. Changing now is NOT a good idea.” That frowsy little rose, trying to live in eternal sunshine. What it really needs is to hunker down and wait.
Apparently pruning plays a critical role in the rose’s rest period. Pruning triggers growth. Literally on a hormonal level, it signals to the rose: Replace what was lost! Hence the frowsy rose trying to trick us into extending its bedtime! But the reverse is also true: refusing to prune as fall comes, allowing rosehips to form, swell and blush, signals with hormones and enzymes: sleep. We’ve done what we came for, we’re good, go to bed. Biologically, roses are designed for rest. Any observant gardener can see it; with the right knowledge and tools, it can be measured.
When I venture back to my roses after the dormant period, I’m not just removing dead wood, shaping the plants, cleaning things up. I’m literally ringing the morning alarm bell. My sharp cuts into the plant’s branches kick off a whole party, releasing hormones telling the rose to replace the plant matter I’ve just removed. It triggers roots growing, making food, and stored food lower in the rose bush making its way up, so the growth buds pop into new canes and leaves. Like the glorious spring growth in my leafy neighborhood, shining in myriad tones from burgundy to gold, the rose’s new growth is colorful, usually an enticing deep purple or brilliant fuschia, before settling into the glossy green of a healthy plant. Early on, there’s no chlorophyll–these striking red leaves are the color of a rose bush without the sun’s transforming power. But as spring advances, the plant partners with the sun to create chlorophyll, and as it accumulates, convert red leaves to green. Time for flowers!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, time to prune.
February 26, 2022
Two weeks in, and I have three roses left to prune, the big climber in front and the two in back that grow long, north-reaching tendrils, out from under our Japanese maple tree, stretching for sun. I need twist ties from the hardware store for the climber, so I opt for the two in back. They are a few years old now, with a lot of solid canes to work from; this should be fun.
I love pruning. It’s my favorite garden chore, above even harvest. Why?
Pruning is a logic puzzle. Out of a twisted knot of dead wood, twigs, crossing canes, old leaves, all the dead weight, fashion a simple figurine, open and elegant, vase-like. It requires a lot of “no,” cutting away shrubbery the rose spent all of last season producing.
Some of it is low-hanging fruit, clear choices to ease me into the ritual of letting go. Some of the formerly bright green canes have browned, now lifeless sticks. Left unattended, it festers, spreading down, killing more of the plant. The ruthlessness of the pruning shears is the best way to bring new life. And you can’t snip it off in part; to salvage what is still living, you have to remove dead wood at the source. At a distance, you might not notice that a part of the plant has died; shielded by healthy leaves, canes that have turned brown and dry can be hidden. You have to get up close and pay attention. But once you see it, you know with certainty it has to go. It is easy enough to eliminate dead wood; nothing’s coming from that anyway.
Removing tiny twigs, also a no-brainer; we don’t want the rose wasting precious energy on something so piddly. We want to concentrate the coming burst of life about into a few sturdy canes, so they can focus their energy on blooms.
But most of the branches are not clear goners. Sometimes there are multiple healthy branches competing for the same limited space. When the canes are up in each others’ business, they have no breathing room. We all need a little space. Sometimes one good cane crosses wires with another, and over time, the friction would create a wound, allowing disease to enter and take hold. Smaller pieces growing in toward the middle come off to open up the center. The good of the plant requires letting go, preemptively, of some good possibilities to make space for future more.
The formerly full bushes look uncomfortably roomy now. But I’m making space in faith that letting go of even some good growth now will allow, in time, for even more beauty.
I know the rose can’t thrive if there isn’t good airflow, if light can’t get in, if too many canes compete for nutrients. If I try to have it all, I fail at what I really want: flowers in a vase. The results are fairly immediate, either way. The rose bushes I’m snipping down now will be full and blooming in three months’ time. I know the theory. I act on faith. I see my trust rewarded. It only takes a few cycles of trusting the process and shedding excess rose matter for it to become engrained. This is just how it works. Err on the side of removing more than you think you will. It grows back, you’ve seen with your own eyes.
A glance at the piles of clutter dotting my home, ever escaping my harried attempts at order, reveals I’m no minimalist, though I wish I were. I have no problem generating ideas, and an extraordinarily difficult time killing them. I am constantly scheming for ways to include everything: hustling to find a date that works for all the people I wanted to invite; mixing and matching bits and pieces of flowers and foliage to include all my garden gatherings in wild, incoherent arrangements; inventing eclectic dishes specifically targeted to use the maximum number of ingredients. Aesthetically, I adore the pared down vibe. I look for it in Airbnbs, relish and envy in equal measure at friends’ houses who more successfully embody it, am constantly working on having fewer so what I do have, be it clothes or commitments, is better, and better appreciated and stewarded. I deeply value the end result. But the requisite process isn’t my nature, and every “no” I eek out feels like a battle.
But not with roses. With roses, I have come to see the value of no. And maybe what I learn with the pruning shears can carry over to the rest of life. The parallels are, as my son would say, “too tempting,” so obvious it feels pedantic to list them: What has died and needs to be shed so the whole can stay healthy? What is crowded, too much in the same limited space? What needs definition, bringing a sense of shape to a jumble of separate components? Pruning assumes something needs to go. Pruning assures me it is for a good purpose. Will I be brave enough to chop some old branches out and trust the process?
March 14, 2022
A month after pruning season started and I still haven’t done the big climbing rose. Life has been especially busy. We are right in the middle of an accidental string of four separate trips in a two month period. After all that staying home during Covid, suddenly the activity is piling on, and I’m wishing for less adventure, more cozying up with a monotonous routine. Who’d have imagined? Of course it is the most human of things to want something other than what you have, to imagine true goodness and life is to be found just beyond the horizon. Love of money may be the root of all kinds of evil, but I can’t help wondering if envious fantasizing of anything is the real problem. Perhaps we love money as a means to the end–of making my here as good as I fantasize some other there might be.
And there’s nothing like Instagram for whipping up a frenzy of envy, whether in the form of the others’ actual content or their audience’s reaction. It could be the ownership of an object someone else flaunts, or the perceived security of a relationship. I have a memory of a childless co-worker’s effusive birthday tribute to a fellow childless co-worker, proclaiming her “my ride or die friend,” series of photos of the two with arms entwined and shining smiles in various Instagrammable locales. I remember thinking, “I want to be someone’s ride or die! I want someone to like me enough to devote an Instagram tribune to our adventures.” Because that’s true friendship, right? I didn’t consider that behind the snapshot of grinning besties are flesh and blood people with all the misunderstandings, insecurities, unfulfilled hopes and frustrations of any human relationship, let alone that either of them might look with envy at my posts of babies.
Another memory: a co-worker posting photos of her birthday tubing outing, many of our fellow co-workers decked in sunglasses and bikinis, beers up, coasting down-river. I wasn’t invited. Of course I wasn’t; we were friendly but not close, and my co-worker isn’t obligated to include me in any given gathering of friends. Besides, who invites a woman with three loud, dependent little bodies to drink beer in floaties on a river?
Envy makes it harder to celebrate the friendship of others’ on its own terms, hard to celebrate anything in others. It turns us inward, makes us restless, sees good somewhere else as a threat to our well-being. It takes what one moment contended us and whispers seductively, “Maybe you should keep looking for something better, maybe this isn’t enough.”
I am not peddling a cure. But I know envy doesn’t so easily take root in me when I stop poking my head over the fence and fixating on others’ gardens, and tend to my own.
We get home from our second of our four spring trips on Sunday afternoon, and immediately set two of the kids down for naps. It’s a beautiful sunny day, the kind of false spring that could lull a girl into putting summer plants out early, only to see them devastated by an odd late freeze a week later. But I haven’t had time to start summer seedlings, so my garden tardiness has at least averted that disaster. I grab the clippers and look Nate’s way; he nods, and I make a beeline for the last rose. I started pruning around Valentine’s Day, just like my mother-in-law told me to, but life keeps interfering with my plans to finish. There are so few hours of free daylight, and lately they’ve all been spoken for. I’d set time aside to prune before we left for this most recent trip, but someone needed those hours in a way that was right to give, even if it meant sacrificing my precious lone chunk of free time.
Now I’m getting antsy; pruning has a ticking time bomb, of sorts. The whole point is waking up the hibernating plant and prodding it into making roses, removing excess plant matter that would siphon precious growth energy from a few intentional canes. Unchecked, the plant will run a lazier course, growing haphazardly, squandering growth energy on any trifling branch seeking sun. You’ll slowly end up with a tangled forest of limbs with no sense of decorum.
To generate good roses, you must be choosy. By paring back to a few essential canes, you can purposely direct to them all the force of the first flush of spring. Prune too late, and the plant will already have generated a whole lot of life you’re just going to lop off, wasted energy that isn’t going into actual roses, isn’t going anywhere but the trash. (You can’t even compost rose clippings; they can spread disease. This garden waste truly is trash.) It is hard enough to make myself hack away the taller branches still hibernating, with the telltale red nubs that will unfurl to become first leaves not yet dotting the length of the cane. It’s nearly impossible to muster up the will to remove branches already showing the promise of flowers. All that growth, especially with my sun-starved garden, feels like a miracle. Cutting it back is a supreme act of faith. I have to steel myself, recall that more now doesn’t mean more later, then ruthlessly unleash my clippers.
I haven’t gotten to this final rose, the climbing Zephirine Drouhin, until now because I’ve known how much time it would take. It is enormous, for one thing, long flexible canes drooping and swaying, tangled with each other. I also need special tools: zip ties. Unlike other roses, pruning the climbing rose isn’t primarily about removing matter and cutting down to size. This is about training the canes along a trellis, positioning them in place and guiding them to stay put at key locations by entwining the branch to something stable. With a zip tie. The little black pieces of plastic aren’t nearly as romantic as the lush waterfalls of blooms that always seem to be in season on episodes of Bridgerton, but they are a crucial part of the process. They are flexible but tough, and their stability provides an important spine to the framework I’m trying to create with the rose branches.
Training is mostly used to mean practice these days–what my kid does at soccer, what we do for new hires. I like this alternate meaning: helping something reach its potential, by providing structure and boundaries. It isn’t unfettered freedom that allows Bridgerton roses to pour over the garden gate in all their romantic glory. “Free” rose canes wave in the wind, catch on passersby, collapse under their weight, produce a single bloom at the top. Their beauty is the product of careful tending, gently and repeatedly pushing the canes in a particular direction. I don’t like the idea of constraints, but I like the idea of growth, of reaching potential, of beauty. My climbing roses remind me every year of the value of having a foundation on which to grow, of the helpfulness of intermittent limits in ultimately expanding possibility. Life with a structure on which we can be trained may feel less free in the moment. But like my zip ties allow my rambunctious Zephirine Drouhin to spill pink blossoms across my porch siding at greater heights each year, it makes possible a greater freedom over time.
A month after I started, and the last rose is finally done. I’m left with a cascading series of flexible sticks pinned to a trellis, giving absolutely no hint of the richly scented Zephirine Drouhin blooms that will brilliantly cover this whole wall in two more months’ time.
