Standard roses – planting, care and cutting

First, the best location for your standard rose is selected. The choice of location is of great importance; it essentially determines whether a rose grows and thrives well, perhaps more so for standard roses than for other roses. The standard rose does not want to be planted in a location where it has to constantly fight against strong winds, which is not good for it even with a support pole.

Otherwise, the location should have good, humus-rich garden soil and be in the sun for at least five hours a day (sunny or partially shaded location). The sunnier, the more flowers a standard rose will develop in good health. If you want to place a standard rose in a not so sunny place, you should ask for a very robust, shade-tolerant variety.

At the planned location, the rose should not have to struggle with strong-growing competitors as neighbors, as that could demand too much strength from a standard rose in particular.

If the soil is too sandy in an actually suitable location, you should improve the area around the rose by adding compost. If the soil at the site is too compacted, it has to be loosened up to a depth of at least one meter; with deep-rooted roses, any compression above would act like a kind of “root barrier”. That would then probably result in poor growth. This is e.g. This is often the case, for example, on new building sites due to the constant traffic of construction machinery, usually only a layer of 30 to 40 cm mother earth is piled up, in which most of the flowers / shrubs can take root, but roses are not enough.

Even very heavy soils have to be loosened up because the soil for a rose has to be loose, water-permeable and well-ventilated; a standard rose would quickly give up on a soil that is constantly too moist.

When choosing a location for the standard roses, make sure that you allow for enough space if the standard roses are to be put down in winter. If you intend to do this, you have to include the space for the crown that will later be bent down, if it is simply to be packed on its support pole, this is not necessary.

Planting and caring for the standard roses

The standard roses are planted in autumn, when the soil is nice and moist and the rose can take root over the winter before it starts the next flowering season. Here’s how to go about planting your standard roses:

• Standard roses are planted with a support pole to prevent the crown from breaking off. Because the raised crown on the long trunk is exposed to the action of wind in a completely different way than a rose bush, here considerable leverage can develop, which the trunk cannot always withstand.
• You first dig a planting hole at the desired location, which should be a bit larger for the standard rose than the 40 x 40 cm usual for rose planting.
• If you want to improve the soil beforehand, even considerably larger, then it is first mixed and then some of the improved soil is poured in again.
• Now the support post is first driven at least 20 cm deep into the ground. Overall, it must be long enough so that it extends into the crown of the rose after it has been hammered in.
• Usually you buy the roses in the root area ready for planting, but damaged root parts should be removed.
• The entire roots are trimmed shortly before planting, except for a total length of around 25 cm, usually you can / must only remove a few centimeters.
• If the roots are very short, do not cut them; too much pruning will rob the rose of the reserves stored in the roots.
• Now the rose can go as deep into the earth as it was in the container, and you have to be careful not to dig the so-called cone interface.
• This thickening at the base of the trunk (the cone interface) should be a hand’s breadth above the surface of the earth.
• Then fill the planting hole and water the rose well so that the earth sags, after a few hours it is refilled and the whole process may be repeated.
• The standard rose now has to be tied to the trunk, once roughly in the middle of the support pole and once just below the crown.
• Take a coconut rope that is not too thin, it makes the most natural impression.
• If the crown shoots are very long, they can be pruned to around 30 cm when planting in autumn so that the rose can be better packed for the winter.
• But do not be too eager to shorten it, every cut surface that is not closed by winter is a gateway for diseases.
• If the crown is not too lush, you should therefore hardly prune back the crown shoots when planting in autumn; you can do that when pruning in spring.

In terms of irrigation and fertilizer, the standard rose is treated like any other rose, more precisely like the rose that forms the crown, if special requests are to be observed.

Cutting of standard roses

Basically, a standard rose – like any other rose – is pruned in spring.

Multi-flowering standard roses are pruned like multi-flowering bed roses or shrub roses – all inward-growing shoots are removed, all diseased shoots too, of course, and the rest is cut evenly all around. If it is important to you that your standard rose develops a beautiful round shape, you have to select the interfaces all around very carefully and shorten the main shoots quite radically to a regular shape from which the rose will now develop. If you want it to be perfect, you should also calculate in advance which shoot will grow how much, and accordingly cut strong shoots deeper than less strong shoots. If you’d rather not go under the fortune tellers, just cut nicely round and fairly short, if later cheeky shoots with buds protrude,

If the crown of your standard rose consists of a hybrid tea rose, you will usually also be able to remove a lot of thin and weak shoots.

A specialty of a standard rose is the taming of the wild shoots. Like every refined rose, the rose variety that is attached does not only sprout there as it should, namely from the refinement point at the top of the trunk. But in all possible places, directly from the root area or somewhere in the trunk, for example. These unwanted shoots should be removed, they deprive the standard rose of water, light and nutrients, and a grafted rose is not as resilient as a true-root rose anyway. You can recognize these wild shoots because they have a different shape and color from the environment.

Wintering of the standard roses

Standard roses are sold in absolutely winter-hardy varieties, but some of the grafted varieties cannot cope with too much cold, which you should explore when buying.

These standard roses have to be packed well in winter, especially the grafting areas should be well protected from frost and winter sun. To do this, you can wrap the standard rose, wrapped in a protective fleece in a jute sack. Wrap the crown loosely with it to allow air to circulate and tie the fleece below the finishing point. If the crown is very lush, it should be trimmed before packing and, if in doubt, supported several times so that the shoots do not break when the “package” is loaded by snow.

In the past, common winter protection was simply to bend the standard roses and fix the crown on the ground. It was covered with earth and covered with sticks. Today this rather simple hibernation method is no longer used that often, as the trunk of many of the highly grown standard roses like to kink when they are bent to the ground.

Standard roses are available in different designs

Since the standard roses are an invention of the rose breeders anyway, they thought up and bred several forms at the same time:

• Dwarf-stem roses develop trunk heights of up to 40 or 50 cm, mostly because of the proportions dwarf roses and ground cover roses are refined on a robust wild rose stem. Dwarf-stem roses look wonderful in planters or in narrow beds.
• Half-stem roses grow up to 60 or 70 cm high in the stem. Here, too, a wild rose stem is used as a base, the refined crown can consist of bed roses, hybrid tea roses, ground cover roses or shrub roses. With their medium size, half-stem roses fit very well in herbaceous beds or on the edges of a garden path.
• The correct high-stemmed roses are so named when they develop three-foot stems. The varieties are the same as for the half-stem roses, but it takes longer to grow to a tall stem. Standard roses look good wherever an eye-catcher at a certain height should attract attention, and they can be grouped into very special avenues of roses.
• Cascade stem roses are real splendid plants, with stem heights of 1.20 m to 1.40 m. If a shrub rose is refined here on the wild rose stem, a rather bushy growing cascade stem rose emerges. However, if a climbing rose or a rambler rose is used, cascade stem roses with picturesque overhanging shoots develop, wonderfully romantic and eye-catching solitaires, for which the frequently found name weeping rose is actually not really appropriate.

Conclusion