Propagating roses yourself – here's how

Propagating roses yourself is not difficult

Sooner or later, many friends of roses feel the wish to propagate the queen of flowers themselves. The reasons are varied; not infrequently there is no other way to obtain a specimen of a variety that has been growing for many years at a friend's, an acquaintance's or a neighbour's. Sometimes a 'backup' of one's own very rare or no longer available rose is also wanted.

Professionally, in rose nurseries, roses are almost always budded, that is, grafted. For the hobby gardener this is usually too laborious, and there are simpler ways that reach the goal with less effort. Even though you can buy a great many different roses from us we are happy to tell you about them. Essentially there are these four ways of propagating roses:

Propagating roses from cuttings

Almost all plants can also be propagated, and that includes roses from cuttings. Depending on the variety, they root with varying ease and speed. Above all ground-cover roses and rugosa roses (Rugosa) are also propagated professionally from cuttings. This type of propagation is vegetative, producing new plants of the same variety with the same characteristics as the parent. A rose grown from a cutting is called own-root.

What you need for this:

a rose plant with well-ripened shoots from the previous year
seed-starting compost, preferably sterile
a tray, pots or a prepared spot in the garden or greenhouse
if possible a cover or a small polytunnel
a sharp pair of secateurs
water, a glass or several glasses
optionally rooting powder / rooting hormones
6–8 weeks of patience

The right time for rose cuttings

You will have the best success with cuttings in early summer, when the roses are flowering for the first time or have just finished flowering. But it is worth a try later in the year as well.

Preparing the seed-starting compost

Before the rose cuttings are cut, you should spread the seed-starting compost in the tray, the pots or the shady spot in the garden where they will be inserted. It should have an even depth of about 8 cm or more and be pressed down lightly.

How the rose cutting is cut and stripped of leaves

A cutting should be about the length of a pencil and extend a few millimetres beyond a leaf axil both at the top and at the bottom. On the freshly cut cuttings, all leaves except the uppermost ones are now removed. The freshly cut cuttings are then placed in water. If you are taking cuttings from several rose varieties, they should now be labelled or handled separately from one another.

Inserting the cuttings into the seed-starting compost

The freshly cut cuttings are now inserted one after another, variety by variety, into the seed-starting compost. They should not touch each other and should sit deep enough that the upper leaves stand a few cm above the soil. Then the soil is moistened with a spray bottle. If the cuttings are not in a greenhouse and you have the option of fitting a plastic cover, a polytunnel or a similar cover, you should do so.

Until the rose cuttings have rooted

For the following weeks you only need to make sure that the cuttings are moist enough and have sufficient air circulation. Apart from that, you should leave them in peace and not pull or wiggle them. That could damage the fine root hairs that are forming and jeopardise the success of the propagation from cuttings.

Separating the rooted cuttings

After 6–8 weeks, your cuttings should show new growth from the leaf axils. This is the right time to take them out of the seed-starting compost. Once carefully removed, the little mini roses should already have a well-structured root system. They now go into small pots or straight to their final location, where they are looked after individually. In addition to a good supply of water, they should be shaded and protected from wind in the first year.

Grafting roses

Grafting or budding roses is a vegetative propagation in which buds detached from the mother plant are inserted into the root collar of a rootstock. In the following year the wild rootstock is cut off above the graft union, and the grafted rose grows from the inserted bud. In the autumn of the following year the grafted rose is ready and can be transplanted, or harvested and sold as a bare-root rose, or cultivated further as a container rose.

Can you propagate roses with a potato ?

Although you keep seeing amazing videos online, propagating roses in a potato usually does not work. The cutting in the tuber mostly rots, and the only thing that sprouts is the potato.

Can you plant a cut rose ?

A rose cut, for example from a bouquet of flowers, can be planted and you can try to get it to root. To do so, the flower or bud should be cut just above a leaf; the further procedure is as for propagating roses from a cutting.

What are own-root roses ?

Own-root roses are roses whose roots are of the same variety as the rest of the plant. They have been propagated either from cuttings, hardwood cuttings, layering or from seed. In contrast to grafted roses, no wild rose rootstock was therefore used to obtain a plant of the desired variety. No wild shoots can form on own-root roses either.

Roses propagated on their own roots often cause problems in the garden because of their almost unchecked spread. This results above all from very many root suckers, which are often hard to control. Rosa rugosa is even described as an invasive species because of this behaviour. Because this is wanted in public green spaces and on large-area plantings, ground-cover roses and varieties often used for compensation areas in particular are propagated very cheaply on their own roots from cuttings.

In the home garden we still recommend giving preference to grafted roses. They do not form root suckers as quickly and can generally be kept under control better than an own-root rose.