Separation Anxiety

You might remember an entry I made last year about how roses can sucker.  Suckering is when a rose sends out lateral growth underground that emerges away from the mother plant.  This growth will also send out new roots to support the plant.

Precious Dream is one of my roses that has sent out such growth.  I had been debating whether I wanted to separate this new growth from the mother plant to create a new bush and decided that I would do it this winter.  Precious Dream is in a sheltered area and in this mild winter its dormancy hasn't even caused it to loose its leaves.  To prepare the plant for this separation I have been watering it this past week to make sure it was well hydrated.

Next I dug up the lateral growth to make sure it in fact had developed roots and to track down where it connected to the mother plant.  I even found a new shoot coming from this same lateral growth.  The lateral was shallower than I had expected it to be. 

Then came the hard part, actually taking the shears and severing the plants from one another.  Not that it is physically hard, just the wondering if it is really ready to be on its own.  (Do I sound like a parent with two kids in college.)  This is made easier by knowing that dormancy and being well hydrated keeps the stress levels down on the plants and that now each will be able to recover more easily.  After separating the two plants I added some new soil on top of the uncovered lateral and roots, pulled the mulch back over, and then watered them again.  Now I will wait until March to move the new plant to its new location at the Prague Rose Garden. 

I also, much less delicately, separated a sucker on Reine de Violettes with a shovel placed very near the mother plant and then simple plunged the shovel all the way into the soil and withdrew the shovel without disturbing the soil.  I prepared this plant with some light pruning a week before and keeping it well watered.  It will also be moved to the park in March.  This photo was taken a week after I had separated the connection between the mother and child plants.

Suckers can be a Good Thing

Sometimes a rose will send out growth which goes out laterally underground to emerge out from the main portion of the plant.  This type of growth is often called "suckering."  Since most roses are grafted onto the rootstock of a different form of rose (the top half of the rose you see is the desired rose and the bottom half has vigorous growing roots whose flowers you never want to see) suckering is often thought of as a negative thing.

On a grafted rose this growth (sucker) will not produce the desired flowers and worse it will pull the energy of the roots away from the desired rose on top, thus the name sucker.  When roses are grown on their own roots they can still send out a sucker but it is all the desired rose so it simple adds to the size of the desired plant.  Such is the case with the roses I grow and of Precious Dream to the left.  When I planted Precious Dream I gave it some room so this expansion will simply help fill in the area it has been given.

Some roses that sucker will expand over large areas, invading the space of companion plants.  As own root roses sucker the new growth also produces new roots.  Once this new growth has matured it can be severed from the main plant and grown on its own or allowed to grow in its larger capacity.  For now Precious Dream is still growing into its space so I will enjoy the added fullness this new growth provides.