How to Plant, Care for, and Maintain Roses | Complete Rose Gardening Guide

Welcome to your ultimate guide to growing gorgeous roses! Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned gardener, this video will walk you through everything you need to know about planting roses, caring for them year-round, preventing common pests, and keeping your roses blooming beautifully.

In this video, we’ll cover: ✅ How to choose the right rose variety
✅ Best soil preparation tips
✅ Proper planting techniques
✅ Watering and fertilizing schedules
✅ Pruning methods for healthy growth
✅ Natural and effective pest control
✅ How to prevent common rose diseases
✅ Seasonal maintenance tips

Amazon Links

Rose Tone: https://amzn.to/3EMLoS1
Rose and Flower Care: https://amzn.to/42QfOuN
Osmocote: https://amzn.to/4iHn4Pf

Link to article reference on bees and imidacloprid;

Study Finds Imidacloprid Safe for Honey Bees at Realistic Exposure Levels

0:00 Intro
0:30 The Rose Family, Rosaceae
1:06 Where to plant a rose
1:52 Types of Roses
3:33 Giving your rose enough space to grow
4:49 The correct way to dig a hole to plant a rose
7:04 The correct way to plant a rose
8:55 The correct way to water in your rose
10:41 When to water a rose
11:32 The correct way to fertilize a rose
13:44 How to control insects and diseases in roses
17:29 How and when to prune roses

roses the most popular landscape plant on the planet we’ve been cultivating these for tens of thousands of years in this video I’m going to show you how to plant how to water how to fertilize insect control disease control and so much more hi I’m Dr tom Warren and you’re watching the Plant Doctor let’s get started [Music] roses are in the family rosaceier and this is a huge family of plants there’s over 5,000 members of the family rosaceier and there’s over 20,000 cultivars just to give you a glimpse into how big this family is all apples all apricots all blackberries all strawberries all peaches all almonds and of course roses are in this group just a massive group of plants but they all have some cultural characteristics that they share and one of those with the sight selection is being full sun when planting a rose you want to put it in as much sun as possible the more shade that it gets the more leggy your plant’s going to be also it’s going to be more prone to getting diseases that we’ll talk about later so when you’re selecting a site find full sun another thing that you want to look for is well- drained soils if you have heavy clays so if you look at your ground and you have ground that looks gray anorobic clays roses anything in the rose family is not going to do good in that soil ideally you want a sandy lawn that is moist but well- drained for any member of the family rosaceier so we’ve mentioned there’s almost 5,000 species in the family rosaceier and even within just the genus Rosa which the roses are a part of there’s thousands of cultivars but we can group these into four subgroups the first group is going to be the hybrid T rose so a hybrid tea is a traditional rose that you may go pick up at a florist it has a long stalk with a single flower on top and this is what this rose is here it is a hybrid tea rose the next type is what we call flora bunda flora bunda has a very similar look to the hybrid tea the only true difference being is that the flowers are going to be in clusters you’re not going to have a single flower on a single stock you’ll have multiple flowers per stock the third type is a climbing rose so a climbing rose is going to need something to grow on this is more of a vine type rose so you need a fence or a trellis or an arbor to train this rose as it continues to grow they can get very tall they can get 30 40 50 feet tall if you never prune them and they’ll just trail and trail and trail they’re very pretty but you need a lot of space to grow them the fourth group is going to be the miniature rose so man has bred the hybrid t- rose into so many different variations that one of those is a miniature rose so all a miniature rose is is a dwarf hybrid t- rose so if you’re growing in a pot you have limited area to grow your rose you may want to consider a miniature rose for those compact tight spots once you found the correct area with the right amount of sunlight and the right soil type the next thing you want to look at is how big does your rose get do you have a miniature rose or do you have a big rose you’re going to need enough space for that rose to get mature so in this area here I have plenty of room for this Julia Child’s rose this is a bush form rose that I can keep pruned in that three to four foot tall range in a two to three foot wide range as well and so this is the ideal spot so the sun rises behind the camera comes over my right hand shoulder and sets over here behind us and it’s in full sun it’s going to get 12 plus hours of sun here during the summer off to my left I have a butterfly bush and I have a sedum autumn joy as well all these plants love full sun the good thing about the butterfly bush and the sedum is that they’re perennial i cut those back every year and they start over fresh so I don’t have to worry about my roses and my sedums and my butterfly bushes all growing into one big mass because we’re essentially starting over every year with the sedum and the butterfly bush so off camera I’ve already removed back this layer of pine straw where we’re going to plant this rose and I’ve got the camera angled as such to try to get a close look at the ground and how I dig this hole and so I want my hole to be as deep as the root ball is tall you do not want to plant your rose too deep and there’s a couple of reasons for that one your rose does not like to have wet feet like we mentioned earlier if you’re planting in heavy clays you’re going to have some issues but two often times roses can be grafted and all a graft is is where we took a part of one rose called a scion and grafted it to another different rose called a roottock if we cover that up where the scion and the rootstock meet that’s just a place for mold and bacteria to start to grow in a rose and it’s not a good thing also you want to get your hole roughly twice as wide as the root ball is for your row so we’ve got a little three gallon pot here so I’m going to dig out roughly twice as wide as this three gallon pot and that hole looks pretty good a pro tip for you when determining how deep your hole actually is or how deep you should dig your hole uh if you’re a seasoned landscaper like me you can probably just eyeball it but what you can do take your shovel handle put it at the base of your pot see where the root ball of the plant lines up on your shovel handle and for me it was roughly that deep then I can go back to my hole put the shovel handle in the hole and that mark that we just made needs to be aligned more or less with the top of the root ball and the top of the ground so now that we have our hole dug in the right place in the yard at the right depth it’s time to plant our rose and this may be obvious there are some thornless roses but most roses will have thorns i would encourage you to wear gloves while doing this and how I want you to take your rose out of the pot just don’t grab the vegetative material and pull up a lot of times I see homeowners make the mistake of doing this and they’re breaking the root ball away from the green vegetative material and we don’t want to do that so lay your rose on the side press on the side of the pot that’s going to loosen your root ball up a little bit and then hold the plant on its side and this is where the the gloves come in handy we’re going to take between our index and thumb like this and grab the base of the rose put it on its side take one of our fingers put it in the wheat pole on the back side be careful when you remove the pot if your rose is not fully rooted out you may have some potting mix fall off so if that happens you may want to lay it on the ground before you finish removing the pot now here’s our rose i’m going to look for root girdling so that is where roots are have been in a pot for too long and they’re growing in circles you may need to cut those or massage those with your fingers but this particular specimen looks pretty good so we’re going to go ahead and plant it and so remember we want the top of the root ball level with the top of the ground and we want to make sure our rose is nice and tall and straight it’s not leaning over either which way and if your soil became clumpy like this when you removed it one thing you want to do is just bust it up and we’re going to back fill so the advantage to busting up these dirt clouds is it’s going to get in and around the root zone a whole lot easier there’s no air pockets in and around the root zone we want complete coverage of soil around this root ball once you have successfully planted your rose you’ll want to go ahead and water in your rose thoroughly i’m going to water this to the point of saturation one there’s going to be a little bit of transplant shock two just like with crushing up our dirt clouds the water going in between the root zone and the native soil is going to help get the native soil right up against the root ball so we don’t have any air pockets in our planting hole and this is also a good opportunity to talk about watering regiment moving forward with your rose through the first year of this plant’s life here in the ground i’ll probably water this twice a week after that I’m not going to water it at all unless I enter drought conditions now your situation may be a little bit different i’m in zone 8A in the southeastern United States my area gets 54 inches of rain per year i don’t have to water a lot of this stuff but if you’re live but if you’re living in a more aid climate you may have to come out and water once a week but a good rule of thumb whether your rose is in a pot or in the ground throughout the first year just use the finger check rule so put your finger all the way in the ground your index finger in between the native soil and the root ball you should be able to easily get it down in there and if your fingertip is completely dry when you do that just go ahead and water if you feel moisture down there wait and it’s as easy as that roses are fairly drought tolerant you’re not going to lose them if they go without water when they need it for two or three days they may wilt a little bit but they’ll perk right back up for you one more thing we should mention about watering roses is what part of the day to water rose i don’t want you to water these late in the evening reason being is this roses are notorious for getting fungus issues in particular black spot so when we water and we have all these little water droplets sitting on the leaves if that’s happening in the middle of the day it’s not that big of a deal they’re going to evaporate relatively quickly if we water right before dark that water is going to sit on the rose leaves all night and that’s just an opportunity for those funguses to attach to the leaves and begin to reproduce so if you can water early in the morning and that gives you the maximum amount of time for the water to evaporate off the leaves ideally we want to fertilize roses in the early spring as the new foliage begins to emerge and I like to use an organic product from Espoma and this particular bag is holy tone they have berry tone they also even have a rose tone but I’m going to give you a pro tip here if you look at the guaranteed analysis of the Espoma organic products regardless if it’s Holy Tone Berry Tone Roset Tone it’s all the same it’s the same ingredients at the same mixtures so if you can’t find rose tone which by the way I’ll leave some down in the description below you can pick up some Holy Tone and it works just as well so here again I like doing this in early spring i’m a little late here uh we’re in mid-spring but I’m going to do this for demonstration and the way that this organic fertilizer works is bacteria in the soil begin to break it down so as the soil temperatures rise the bacteria that come out of dormcy they feed on the fertilizer which in return feeds our rose a synthetic fertilizer that I like to use and ideally if you’re planting roses let’s say late spring into summer you may want to go this route and then the following year use the organic fertilizer is osmmaote so osmicote is a slowrelease synthetic fertilizer it has all of your macronutrients so all of your nitrogen your phosphorus your potassium as well as your micronutrients so all those things that we don’t necessarily associate with plant health there’s 18 essential elements that plants need to uh complete their life cycle things like magnesium manganese copper malibdum just some random elements it’s all in here in the correct amount so you can put a tablespoon of osmicote on either side of your rose so like a half circle on uh the front side half circle on the back side and then the following spring you can circle back around and start using those organics that work with your soil to feed your plant let’s talk about diseases in roses we’ve already mentioned black spot and there’s some diseases like black spot that we can control there’s also some diseases we cannot control there’s a new virus around called rose rosette it’s been in my area for around 10 or 15 years now and it’s becoming more and more prevalent and it seems like the method of dispersal with rose rosette is going to be infected pruners so landscape companies or homeowners they’re going around the yard with pruners they prune a rose with um that has rose rosette virus in it it’s now on their pruners they go to the next rose and that one’s infected and that seems to be how it’s spreading but what can we do about the diseases that we can control what can we do about the insects that we can control so my landscape here I don’t use any insecticides in this landscape and it’s beautiful but I’m worried about the rose roses are notorious for Japanese beetles chewing up the leaves so I put a lot of thought into this how do you control the Japanese beetles but yet try to protect the other insects and the answer to that is to use a systemic insecticide called ammatoprid so rose and flower care is made by bio advanced i picked this up at Lowe’s it has a matoprid in it so you mix this up with water uh I think it’s like three ounces to a gallon of water always read your label it’ll tell you exactly that’s just me taking a rough guess there and you water the ground around it the insecticide gets taken up by the roots and laid down in the leaf so why is that advantageous in a garden where you’re trying to limit the amount of insecticides that you’re using well with a a broad coverage uh insecticide say I spray this over the top with something like uh bifthrine anything that lands on it is going to eventually die with the systemic insecticides the insect has to actively feed on the leaf material in order for the insect to pass away so if a a butterfly were to land on this rose it’s not going to kill it if a Japanese beetle begins to feed on this leaf it will kill it and that’s why if I start to have insect issues I’ll go with this product here now I I’ve done some research i’ll try to leave some links down in the description below you may be thinking well what about the pollinators feeding on the nectar of the flowers on the rose and that was a concern that that I had uh peer review right now I I think we’re still figuring this out a little bit but I think there’s some consensus here that it doesn’t hurt the pollinators it seems that the amatloaf is stored more in the leaf material not necessarily in the flower and in the nectar of the plant itself and bees may have some confusion getting back to their beehive they may get a little disoriented if exposed to it but it doesn’t kill them the same with butterflies and and other pollinators as well so I’m not going to use this product unless I see some active damage uh this also has a fungicide in it so if I start to see black spot here again this is a systemic fungicide we can water and it’ll take care of the black spot but we’re not going to do that unless we see the symptoms first i don’t want to treat asymptomatic plants that that might have a problem in the future to in order to try to benefit the local ecosystem here so I’m going to try to give you a point of view angle here about pruning roses i’ve tried to zoom in and get this focused as well as I can so in the fall as the the leaves begin to come off and we just have some stems standing up roses grow in what we call canes so this is a cane right here there’s another cane over here i would just go back to however low I want to cut this on each cane and make one cut wrong time of year to do it i’m not going to do it right now but imagine I had a pair of hand snips i may cut here but don’t cut straight across cut at a 45 degree angle that way when it rains the water runs off of the cut it’s not sitting directly on top of your cut that’s just one more place for some fungus to get into your plant so if you can cut at an angle on these canes in late fall early winter you’ll be doing very well with your rose if you have a tip trick or hack about roses that we did not go over in this video and you want to share it with the audience please leave that down in the comments below we’re a community of learners here on the channel and I would love to learn something from you the viewer also I would like to thank our friends over at PAX Nursery for the Rose they do a wonderful job growing their plant material they’re family-owned since 1967 if you’re in the northeast Alabama area if you’re in the Chattanooga area or northwest Atlanta area make the ride over to PAX tell them Dr warren sent you and I promise you they’ll take very good care of you guys thank you for watching the plant doctor until next time happy gardening