My Mom was always fond of her Roses. We have at least eight plants along the front of our house and driveway.

She would cut these to about a foot from the ground every year, but during the past few years, she wasn’t able to, so they grew bigger and had a lot of branches and limbs dying off. I tried pruning them a bit and taking the dead limbs off, but over the years there were more and I wasn’t as diligent as my Mom was at rose pruning.

After my Mom passed away last year, the Roses were getting more uncontrollable. After going to the Vallejo Garden Club’s rose pruning demonstration this year, I set my mind up to prune our Roses.

As I was pruning, I saw many dead limbs, some of which were pretty large and caused blank areas in the plants. I also noticed that there were lots of rot and decay at the base due to the unswept leaves laying near the base. I cleaned these up as best as I could.

Some of the plants didn’t look like they were going to do well, but they were still alive and I’m hoping they would rebound. There were a couple that I think should be replaced due to the rotting base, but I want to keep my Mom’s Roses, so that gave me an idea… I think I will take cuttings and try to root them to make new plants that I can use in a couple of years to replace the older ones.

[Update] Another thought entered my mind. Since we have a couple of volunteer Roses coming up from the roots (I believe they are Rose ‘Dr. Huey’), I can take cuttings of these, root them up and make new Rose Rootstocks to graft the cuttings above onto.

So starts my Rose Restoration Project…