Remind me....what were we talking about? Must be having one of those Senior Moments!

I have them all the time.

Hi we live in Aquadulce in Sevilla province and last year I planted a rose bought from a garden centre, it has flowered this year and although no more buds are present the leaves still look dark green and heathy. What I want to know is when to prune the rose and how hard. Thanks Stuart.

Nice to see this thread back up. I'm no expert but I'm sure someone will come along who knows more. I do know that in the house we used to rent there were rose bushes and I just lopped them back when they got too overgrown but they were almost constantly in flower.

In the UK I would follow commonly accepted ways of gardening. Here, I just take a look at whatever it is, and if it seems healthy, just kind of attack it kindly to make it the shape I want, or the shape to give it light in the centre, or whatever......... it's worked so far

That works for me too!

Gardening here is a try it and see experience, it's not possible to tell you when to prune as every valley or plane has a different climate here, also roses in particular tend to be in flower all year round.

Now is the best time to prune the roses. They will carry on through the winter and continue flowering unlike in the UK where the cold will stop them but they will be stimulated by a heavy pruning now.

Prune back to about 50cm and thin them out if there are any old branches that look almost dead. Remove all the leaves. They will be flowering again in late March.

Give them an anti fungal spray after pruning.

I've just spent the last week pruning ours - all 75 of them!

I had a bet with someone once about roses, it has always been my assertion that the whole thing about the care of roses is tosh, in a study done by a university in Sydney on pruning grapes they used roses as a test run and the results were amazing so it led me to test the theory.... we took a row of roses at work and half I pruned as they are usually pruned, cutting back to out facing buds, taking no more than 25% off the bush, cutting out the dead wood, you name it, we did it all right..... the other roses, all in the same bed, all fed and cared for the same way I got the hedge cutter out and almost leveled them! I bet you can't guess which ones grew better, stronger, had more flower buds, never got sick and made me look like I knew what I was doing?

Thanks for your quick replies,I will lob a bit off and see how we go.

These are wild and were cut back just a while ago so as I could get the liner over them to put the stones on.

I've found that roses tend to have flowers on them most of the year. Ours get pruned in March and October, for no other reason than they are the end of the year visit and the beginning of the year visit for us!

While talking about roses, a couple of ours seem to suffer from cateplillars really badly. Horrible little things that roll them selves up in the leaves to pupate. Does anyone recommend a spray that would deter them? The plants look quite sickly but seem to recover, only to suffer again the next year. As I said its only a couple, the rest seem to be resistant to them.

As an aside to this, we also have a kumquat tree that is badly effected by the blighters. by May time it honestly looks like an upturned witches broom, no leaves left on it at all. So is there a treatment for citrus trees also?

There are plenty of insecticides that will kill caterpillars but an ecological one is Bacillus Thuringiensis which will kill them but not affect the fruit on the Citrus.

I must say I have never seen caterpillars on my roses - lots of other pests though!