N.K. Murray

The purpose of pruning is to improve the quality of the roses, not to hurt the bush – Florence Littauer

I stopped deadheading my roses last year.

As I sit here looking uphill at another year, I can honestly say this last year was one of the worst. Getting out of bed in the morning was a success on the really bad days. There were more days during this year where I told myself that remembering to eat, remembering to shower, to throw laundry in were all positive signs. Hell, it hurt to breathe more times than I care to count or remember, but I kept breathing.

So, when it came to my roses, it wasn’t a conscious decision – frankly, it just wasn’t at the top of the priority list. For people who may not be familiar with the challenge of having roses, I have several particularly difficult varietals – hybrid teas, floribundas, and grandifloras. I have zero qualms about pulling an underperforming bush out and replacing it, and throughout the 20 years I’ve lived here, I’ve probably had close to 80 different roses in my gardens. Roses (and when I speak of them, I mean the ones I have, not the climbers or the shrubs) require more care than most plants. They are prone to disease and fungus, multiple pests love them, and they require just the right amount of sun and water. Any one of these or a combination of all of them? You have a thorny bare stick growing out of the ground.

They require heavy pruning, and at a very minimum, deadheading. When you don’t, most of the time the leaves fall to the ground and you’re left with an ugly little knob on the end of a spiky branch, where a beautiful bud once bloomed. But, petals on certain roses cling to the stem in a desiccated macabre semblance of what they once were. And if you touch them? They crumble to dust.

It’s hard for me not to find some sort of linkage between the state my gardens were in and this past year. I suppose, much like my roses, I had to prioritize the health of my plant, rather than ensuring it was pretty and perfect. And, more often than not, I was left with an ugly bunch of spiky sticks that kept reminding me what kind of a shit rose owner I was. Every once in a while, I’d have that ghost rose – that one that still purported to be what it used to be until I brushed up against it and the dead pieces floated off in the wind.

Much like the ghost rose, I spent the last year a shadow of the person I was, the person I thought I was, and most importantly, the person I both want and need to be. I’ve spent the last year conserving my energy, safeguarding the fragments of myself that had shattered, hoping I didn’t lose them to the hurricane-force winds that had been raging in and around me. I spent the bulk of this year mourning how they’d never be the gorgeous, perfectly geometric bloom the way they used to be. How I would never be how I used to be.

There are years when the Japanese beetles and the aphids are overwhelming. The black spot and rose rust and verticillium wilt destroy the leaves, causing the plant to be left naked and vulnerable. You eradicate the bugs, cut the stems way back because they’re diseased. You hope the winter doesn’t break their branches. And in the spring, you wait for the burgundy bud shoots amidst the deep green stem which confirms you did the right thing. Or, you pull the plant, and put something new in its. As one of my favorite shows once said – it’s a hope you get lucky sandwich. 

That’s the beautiful thing about pruning – you can excise the parts of the whole that no longer serve the plant anymore. Cutting off those unattractive bits or the ghost roses which remind us of what we’ve lost, leaving the naked, spiky branches – it simply means there’s now energy and a place for a new bud to grow. Even when it seems counterintuitive, cutting away both dead and seemingly healthy branches allows others to take their place – usually at the exact time when the doubt of whether the plant will survive is at its highest.

The rose will never look the same as the day you bought it.

I’m learning that’s ok.

And come spring, I’ll remember to prune my roses, so they can bloom again.

So I can bloom again, too.