Pegging roses

What is arching in roses?

Arching is a technique applied to roses producing long, flexible stems to increase number of flowers. Main stems are then arched, which slows sap and stimulates emergence of numerous floriferous secondary shoots along their entire length. 

For which rose bushes?

Not all roses are suited to it, but this technique is valuable for roses that tend to produce only a single flower at the tip of a very long stem. It concerns roses that produce long, flexible stems.

Some David Austin roses are good candidates such as ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, ‘Evelyn’ or ‘Othello’, for example. You can also rely on Gallica roses, Bourbons, Albas and perpetual hybrids: ‘Reine des Violettes’, ‘Madame Ernest Calvat’, ‘Baronne Prévost’, ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, ‘Celsiana’, ‘Madame Isaak Pereire’, ‘Paul Neyron’, ‘Variegata di Bologna’, to name but a few.

Vigorous climbing roses, over 2 metres, are not good candidates. It quickly becomes unmanageable!

Note that the term also applies to training climbing roses on their support. The principle is the same: it involves fixing the stems as horizontally as possible to stimulate production of floriferous shoots along the entire length of the stem. But in this case, the configuration is different.

When should you arch rose bushes?

Autumn or winter is the right time to arch your rose bushes. Or at least before growth resumes in spring. Personally, I prefer to do it in autumn because it stops stems being blown about by wind and damaged pendulous winter.

Stems should be supple but not too green or too brittle.

How to arch roses?

To arch a shrub rose, you can:

• either take a long flexible stem and fix it to a lower stem so as to form an arch,
• or tie this stem to a stake of bamboo, pegs or rebar hoops driven into the soil, or to the branch of a nearby bush. Either way, this will be hidden by the foliage later.

Any support will do to arch branches successfully.

Once tied, the tip of the stem should be cut so it does not touch the soil to prevent it from layering or dying.

The only drawback, in my opinion, is the ungainly appearance roses develop late in the season, when long stems that will be arched for the following season have grown.

What next?

At season’s end, you will need to remove previous year’s arching stems and bend new supple stems it has produced into arches.