Rose Pruning Tips: Prune Your Roses in January for Better Blooms

A garden designer holding a small
terracotta get with a delicate green plant ladle, standing in a lush garden setting.

A garden designer holding a gardening scissors for pruning.

Rose Pruning Tips: Why and How to Prune Your Roses for Better Blooms

A lush green bush adorned with large, vibrant pink roses gracefully hanging from its branches, creating a beautiful and full display.

Rose pruning is essential in January and February to achieve bigger, better, and more blooms. The following expert rose pruning tips can help ensure your roses thrive with delightful fragrance, stunning appearance, and long flowering periods. Pruning encourages new growth, which directly results in more flowers.

Why Prune Roses Now?

Large, fully bloomed roses in a soft orange hue, standing upright amidst a backdrop of vibrant green leaves.

Pruning roses during the plant’s dormant period (January and February) helps avoid disrupting active growth.

The transport channels within the plant, known as the xylem and phloem, are not actively moving nutrients and water, meaning the plant can recover from pruning without expending energy on

Additionally, rose pruning ensures that flowers are produced on the current year’s growth. Roses (except Ramblers, which flower on last year’s growth) only bloom on new wood.

By removing last year’s wood, you ensure the plant focuses its energy on producing fresh growth and blooms closer to the pruning cuts.

What Happens When You Don’t Prune Roses?

Without rose pruning, plants produce flowers at the very tips of stems, leaving the lower parts bare. Pruning directs growth and encourages blooms on new shoots closer to the base of the plant, making flowers more visible and accessible.

A dark red rose plant with vibrant flowers blooming at the tips of long stems, while the lower sections of the plant remain bare.

A dark red rose plant showcasing blooms clustered at the very ends of tall stems, with the lower portions of the plant appearing bare and exposed.

Other Reasons to Prune Roses

Shaping the Plant: Pruning helps maintain a desired structure, especially for climbing roses trained against walls or structures (as shown below).

Reducing Size: Roses are vigorous growers and can become unwieldy. Pruning keeps their growth manageable and blooms within reach.

Encouraging Regrowth: The root-shoot balance within the plant ensures that cutting above-ground growth spurs new, vigorous shoots.

Unbloomed rose vines intertwined to form a delicate circular shape, showcasing their natural curves and texture.

Unbloomed rose vines intricately intertwined in a crisscross pattern, climbing gracefully from the base of the soll to the top.

Roses are very vigorous, and I like to describe them as Chinese brambles. The cultivated plants we grow originate from species in China and are related to our blackberries.

They behave similarly to a pioneer shrub layer: each year, they grow vigorously, stretching away from where we want to see those blooms. This means the blooms can end up high up and away from us, making them less accessible.

So we want to reduce those plants to bring them back, sometimes to a framework, sometimes just to the base of the plant.

More Rose Pruning Tips for Success

Multiple deep red roses, dusted with frost, perched on long, thorn-covered stems, about to be trimmed with a pair of garden scissors.

Consider Secondary Thickening:
Pruning helps stems develop lignin, a material that increases rigidity. This is especially important for David Austin roses, which have heavy, petal-laden blooms that need sturdy stems to prevent flopping.

Prune Hard for Fresh Growth:
Cutting back hard encourages vigorous growth but may produce thinner stems and smaller blooms.

Prune by a Third for Balance:
This method encourages thicker stems capable of supporting larger blooms.

We want to create a structure that will thicken up year after year and hold those blooms at just the right height without the stems bending over.

If you have pruned hard in the past and found your roses blooming on the ground, don’t prune that rose as hard this time. Prune it by a third to avoid too much regrowth. With secondary thickening, you are creating a shorter regrowth this year.

A towering tree with an intricate network of exposed roots stretching from the base of the trunk into the soil, showcasing a complex and intertwined structure.
The tree is crowned with lush green leaves, creating a striking contrast against the roots below.

Timing is Key

By pruning roses now, you remove last year’s wood, set the stage for this year’s growth, and ensure a robust flowering season. Avoid pruning in March when the plant starts active growth, as this diverts energy from flower production to wound healing.

Observe and Learn

Pruning roses is both an art and a science. Apply these rose pruning tips, then watch how your roses respond. Over time, you’ll develop a deeper understanding of your plants and how to care for them.

Got Questions?

Also, check out our blog on Winter Garden Design Ideas for more tips on keeping your garden thriving year-round.

Rose pruning is your first step to a flourishing garden-start today!