Prune your home-grown roses correctly and they'll bloom twice as much, turning a single stem into a sea of flowers

When people grow roses, what they're after is the profusion of blooms when they flower, and to reach that goal we keep trying all kinds of methods. If you're a beginner at this, then as you dig through the information you might improve your roses through watering, fertilizing, ventilation and other methods, but if you ask an old gardener, they'll tell you all of the above are just side dishes. If you want your roses to bloom well, you still have to work with their own growth patterns, such as the "apical dominance" we're introducing today.

A small "apex" with big knowledge!

What is apical dominance? Simply put, it's the phenomenon where a plant's top grows first while the lateral buds are suppressed. It shows up in many plants, and thanks to it, the more obvious the apical dominance, the more nutrients concentrate at the top of the plant, so the branches in the middle and lower parts receive far fewer nutrients. A flower like this stands out as a single showy stem, but clearly a plant like the rose, which seeks a profusion of blooms, isn't suited to that.

But if we use reverse thinking and shift the nutrients from the top to the branches in the middle and lower positions, wouldn't that let the rose burst into a full pot of blooms? And in fact that's exactly how it works, and that's how we use apical dominance!

Just a little snip of the scissors, and roses can't do without it!

Once you understand the specific working principle, the next steps are very simple, and a quick use of the scissors will take care of it easily.

First prepare a pair of scissors thoroughly sterilized with alcohol or potassium permanganate, and cut off the terminal buds of the branches that originally had apical dominance. When cutting, you can be ruthless, because if you don't cut far enough, you simply won't break the apical dominance. You can measure the height difference between the high and low branches with a ruler beforehand, which makes it easier to cut.

When cutting, be careful to leave a few leaves, otherwise the branch won't be able to carry out normal photosynthesis, which is very unfavorable for the rose's growth. Basically, as long as the branches look even in height at a glance, that's fine. Then disinfect the cut areas on the branches appropriately, and finally place them in ventilated conditions and water thoroughly.

After about a week, we can see new shoots. Once the wounds have fully healed, place the whole pot of roses on the balcony to grow and do the fertilizing work well, and next what awaits us is a sea of flowers.

Of course, besides the method above, we can also use the "training" method, pulling the originally upright, upward-growing rose branches downward with a heavy object so they become horizontal branches. This breaks the original apical dominance. In the rebuilt potted plant, since all the bud positions are at roughly the same horizontal level, the growth hormones will be redistributed, which can stimulate far more bud points than in the natural state and sprout a large number of flowering branches.