It's happened to all of us. Well it's happened to me, anyway. We plant a rose and we wait. The rose grows. Spring comes and goes. No flowers. Fall comes and goes. No flowers. We mulch, weed, water, fertilize with something not too rich in nitrogen. We double-check that the rose isn't getting too much shade. And three years later it's still not blooming. So what's going on?
I realized that my own Baronne Prevost was behaving exactly this way. In previous years it had been growing hardly at all, so I did not prune it this year, in precisely the way I did in previous years. But I did fertilize gently. And I did water much more generously. In response it sent up a large number of new shoots, at least ten of which reached eight feet in length. Among these there were two buds. None of the buds opened. So I'm wondering:
1) What could I possibly do to get this rose to bloom?
2) Should I chuck it? It's in a place where I want a 3 ft tall rose, not an 8 ft tall rose, is it practical to keep it at that height, and will the practices involved encourage it to bloom?
3) Should I move it. And if so when: i.e. after giving it one more chance next year, or before.
I notice from many long hours of perusing questions about roses at HMF that one of the most common is "my rose doesn't bloom" and almost all of the answers address just one issue: shade, pruning, nutrition, water, laterals/pegging, and so on. Wouldn't it be fun do come up with a complete checklist? In doing so, we might save Baronne Prevost from shovel pruning. Maybe Joanne's red hybrid tea rose, too. And maybe many others.
Any takers?
