The Gardening Trick That Can Help Climbing Roses Burst Into Bloom

If you're growing fabulous climbing roses that look absolutely stunning in your garden, there's a clever gardening trick that you can use to help them burst with blooms and create a show-stopping display you'll be proud of. This trick is known as self-pegging. It will encourage the long canes to develop an abundance of bud eyes that will produce many flowering stems. The process involves bending long flexible branches into forced curves and then tying them onto, or winding them around, other canes further down the plant. Essentially, this creates a little stress on these bent stem sections, and the plant will respond by producing growth along the curve, which will naturally grow upright. Any horizontal section of a rose cane will have this innate need to produce vertical stems.

You'll find that each new stem that grows from the horizontal curved section of the lengthy cane will most likely produce at least one and sometimes multiple blooms. This is another thing that roses have an instinctive tendency to do. Self-pegging climbing roses is particularly rewarding because these varieties do produce very long canes, making them much easier to bend into curved shapes. However, you can also try this technique on shrub roses, as long as your rose has some flexible branches that you can easily bend without breaking. 

Find a long cane that originates either from the base of your plant or from a bud union. Carefully bend the cane over to create a nice curve or arc, and then attach the tip of this cane onto another one lower down by using the thorns to grab the bent cane. You could attach the curved cane back onto itself as long as it's flexible enough to allow you to do this. Once you get the hang of pegging your roses, you can even get a little more creative and form the flexible stems into interesting shapes, such as hearts or globes. If you find that the thorns are not grabbing the bent canes securely, you can simply tie them on using some garden twine or a thin strip of fabric. This will usually not be visible once all the new growth emerges.

If you have two stems quite close to each other, you could even twist them together and then form a nice curve before attaching the tips of both, either back onto themselves or a cane lower down on the plant. When you do this, you should get a massive amount of blooms because each of the twisted canes will produce numerous bud eyes. Of course, there are other tips you can use when growing climbing roses to produce gorgeous towering blooms. In fact, you might even be tempted to cover your garden in endless climbing roses by following some expert propagation tips.