Taking the Bloom off the Rose

GLENDALE — Let’s be honest, winter in Southern California just isn’t that impressive.

Yes, it rains some, and it muds. True, locals get the rare chance to wear sweaters made of actual wool. And, to be sure, the sun sometimes hides behind clouds for three straight days (don’t complain of this to people in Detroit or Pittsburgh, where the winter sun is known to go AWOL for a month at a time).

The truth is, however, that even in the half-dead of winter here you usually can go for a run at the beach in shorts and a T-shirt. You can regret having worn a light jacket when Saturday errands reach a fever pitch.

With a little effort, you can even grow roses in your garden, right on through to spring.

Hardly anybody does, though. In fact, right now is when Southern Californians, for lack of blizzards, ice storms and other unignorable signs, acknowledge winter in a peculiar way--by cutting back their rosebushes, even those that aren’t drowsing from cooler temperatures and decreased daylight.

Which is why more than 100 people overflowed a room at the Glendale Civic Auditorium on Saturday to watch rosarians Ken and Bartje Miller of Altadena prune four rosebushes grown overabundant in the permissive southern sun.

“The first thing you want to do is get all of the scraggly wood out,” instructed the jaunty Ken as he laid hands on a hybrid tea rosebush. “You want to keep the center open, because you want the sun to come down on what we call the ‘crown.’ Don’t be afraid to prune. This rose is a lot stronger than you’ll ever be.”

The art of it, Ken said, is to keep only green canes with a lot of incipient buds called “eyes,” and to lop each cane a quarter-inch above its highest healthy-looking eye.

When he was finished, the once-jungly hybrid tea had been reduced to four neat spines, each about a foot high, reaching up in a bowl-like configuration. Nip off any other bits of dead wood on the crown, treat the bush with a dormancy spray or a cup of household bleach (to kill insect eggs and spores around the bush), nourish it with well-balanced rose food and you’ll lay the plant properly to sleep, he said.

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Noticing among his audience looks of surprise at the severity of his cuts, Ken responded, “You folks think you’re not going to have anything come spring, but you’ll have plenty of roses as long as you’ve got good eyes.”

Ken is 82, a retired estate gardener. His wife Bartje has been tending roses for 73 of her 76 years. She’s garden director of the Pacific Rose Society and oversees the Wrigley rose garden in Pasadena.

The Millers, who have been married 57 years, don’t see eye-to-eye on all things rosarian. Ken prefers, for instance, to cut at an angle when he prunes “because I think it makes the sap drip toward the bud.” Bartje, however, insists on horizontal cuts “because the first pruners on Earth were the animals, and don’t you think God would have given them buck teeth if he wanted them to prune on an angle?”

Ken and Bartje have no differences when it comes to the benefits of pruning.

“It forces your rosebush to rest,” Bartje explained after the hourlong demonstration. “In a hothouse they bloom and cut flowers year-round, and in three or four years the plants up and die. The same thing would happen to us if we didn’t rest. The rosebush is still working after it’s been pruned; it’s developing root base. But it’s not working hard enough to go upward.”

Consider what becomes of rosebushes that go unpruned, she said. They get to looking disheveled and unconfident. They have smaller blooms and thinner stems. Their flowers droop like the heads of penitents.

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The pruning of roses, one of the prime symbols of Southern California, isn’t about just the health of plants, though. It has something to do with the well-being of pruners, too.

People want to know that winter is here, definitively, unarguably. Daytime high temperatures that plummet all the way into the high 60s just don’t convey the message with enough authority.

People need the concept of winter--a respite from showiness, a time associated with slowing down, resting up, burrowing in. With building root strength.

Not that self-respecting Southern Californians themselves would slow down in honor of any season.

Still, taking the pruning shears to rosebushes that in some cases are producing in January levels of beauty reached elsewhere only in fleeting high summer requires a certain amount of seasonal conviction.

It doesn’t hurt that roses’ dormancy here, the high holy place of instant gratification, is a far cry from the prolonged coma it is in, say, Minnesota.

“In California,” shrugs Bartje Miller, “two weeks after you prune, you get new shoots.”