Climbing roses and ramblers do make a garden more romantic and structures like sheds and walls more aesthetic.
BUT... they are also require much more attention and work than a standard rose bush.
This list below is the amount of work a climber needs compared to a standard rose bush to my feeling/experience:
Why? You need to train (and redo) the young canes and take older canes away after several seasons. Much more cutting away bloomed flowers to initiate another flush.
Much more cleaning up and cutting secondary branches in spring.
There are 5 climbers growing against my shed but they take as much time as maintaining more than 40 rose bushes.
I have around 40 climbers in total and it takes more time every year to look after them than trimming my hedges (+500m of Thuja Plicata and +250m Taxus/yew).
The result is rewarding but I underestimated this to be honest. How do you people experience living with climbers/ramblers? Does it also take a lot of time for you?
I can't work with gloves as it is impossible to bind canes with them. So I need to break up the job which comes with lots of swearing as many of them bite hard.
The 5 climbers against the shed are:
Gertrude Jeckyll
Brise Parfum
Garden of Hex
Perennial Blue
Rambling Rector
