FLIMBY Extra: Are your roses going ‘blind’?

Because of the timeliness of the topic, we've added this extra post to our Flowers in My Back Yard weekly series. Look for the series to continue Tuesday, June 2.

Usually, late spring is full of roses in my Sacramento garden. It’s the second wave of bloom after the big burst of first roses in April.

But not this year. Where there should be buds, there are only stubs.

Those are “blind shoots,” growth that never produces a flower.

Our warm spell in late winter prompted early bud break and blooms on lots of plants – including roses. Instead of reliably hitting their peak in late April, they bloomed out by Easter.

Afterwards, I dutifully deadheaded spent blooms to prepare the bushes to generate new buds. But spring’s confusing weather – triple-digit one week, 20 degrees cooler the next – created equally confused plants. Is it August? Is it March? (This week just continued that roller-coaster trend.)

On these confused bushes, the stems look healthy with lots of foliage and fast growth. But no matter how long those stems grow, they won’t sprout a bloom.

Blind shoots are the result of extreme fluctuations in temperature and growing conditions. Our yo-yo weather confused many bushes, especially when temperatures plunged back below normal.

Another oddity: Blind shoots can appear on the same bush with normal blooming stems.

Some rose varieties are more sensitive to temperature fluctuations than others. But this spring, I’ve seen blind shoots on more than 100 bushes in my own garden. They’ve appeared on almost every hybrid tea in my garden as well as most of the floribundas and many miniatures. Even the David Austin shrub roses have blind shoots.

This is a condition on modern reblooming roses, which covers most varieties commonly grown in home gardens. Old garden varieties introduced more than a century ago include many once-blooming roses such as ‘Lady Banks’ banksia roses or ‘Dorothy Perkins’ ramblers. Their growth after initial spring bloom is all foliage, no buds.

But modern roses are valued for their reblooming qualities. And an abundance of blind shoots will prevent the bush from producing new buds this summer.

Fortunately, the cure for blind shoots is easy: Prune them off. Restart the growth by cutting the cane or shoot back about 5 or 6 inches, snipping about 1/2-inch above a leaf with five leaflets.

So I’m back deadheading my roses again, but all I’m snipping off this round are a bunch of stubs. Hopefully, if weather cooperates, I’ll have a new round of blooms – probably in late July.