How do I plant a bare-root rose?

Bare-root is the best way to buy a rose: cheaper, a far wider choice of varieties, and better establishment than a container plant. The trade-off is a narrow planting season, from about November to March, and a plant that arrives looking like a bundle of dead sticks. Getting it in the ground correctly takes twenty minutes and determines how the rose performs for the next twenty years.

What you'll need

• Spade and garden fork
• Bucket of water for soaking
• Secateurs
• Gloves
• Well-rotted organic matter (optional)
• Mycorrhizal fungi, especially in an old rose bed (optional)
• Bamboo cane or straight edge to check the depth (optional)

Step by step

1. Unpack it as soon as it arrives and check the roots.They should be flexible and pale inside when scratched. If you cannot plant within a day or two, heel the rose into a spare piece of ground or a large pot of compost — a temporary trench with the roots covered — and leave it there until conditions allow.
2. Soak the roots for one to two hours before planting.A bucket of plain water. Roses arrive dry from the field and rehydrating them before they go in makes a real difference to establishment. Do not leave them soaking for days.
3. Do not plant into frozen or waterlogged ground.Wait. A rose heeled in for three weeks is fine; a rose planted into freezing sludge often is not.
4. Dig the hole wide rather than deep.Wide enough that every root can be spread out without bending or curling round — usually 400 to 500mm across. Loosen the base and the sides with a fork, especially on clay where a spade smears the sides into a barrier.
5. Trim any damaged roots and shorten very long ones slightly.Cut cleanly back to sound tissue. Do not butcher the root system to make it fit a small hole — dig a bigger hole.
6. Find the graft union.It is the knobbly swelling low on the stem where the variety was budded onto the rootstock, and the stems all emerge from just above it. Everything below it is a different plant.
7. Set the union about 50mm below the finished soil level.Lay a cane across the hole as a reference. Planting with the union buried is standard UK practice: it reduces windrock, protects the union from hard frost, and suppresses rootstock suckers. It is the opposite of the rule for trees and shrubs, where the root flare sits at the surface.
8. Spread the roots over a low mound of soil in the base.Build a small cone of soil, sit the plant on it and drape the roots down and outwards. Roots crammed into a narrow pit or pointing upwards never establish properly.
9. If you are using mycorrhizal fungi, apply it to the damp roots now.Sprinkle it directly onto the roots so it is in contact with them. This is particularly worth doing where roses have grown before.
10. Backfill with the soil you dug out, firming in layers.Not with neat compost — roots that find rich material in the hole stay in it instead of spreading. Add well-rotted organic matter to the excavated soil if it is poor, and firm each layer with your heel as you go so there are no air pockets.
11. Water in thoroughly, then mulch.A full watering can settles the soil round the roots even in winter. Mulch with compost or well-rotted manure, kept clear of the stems themselves.
12. Prune the top back in early spring.Bare-root roses are usually supplied part-pruned. In the first spring, cut bush types back hard to two or three buds on each stem — it feels brutal and it produces a strong plant with growth from low down.

Tips

• Plant in the dormant season and the rose has months to root before it has to support leaves. This is why bare-root plants catch up with, and usually overtake, container roses planted in spring.
• Windrock — a newly planted rose loosened by winter wind rocking the stems — opens a hollow round the stem that fills with water. Firm the soil around a new rose again after a stormy spell.
• If you are planting where a rose grew before, read up on replant disease first. The soil is the problem, not the plant.
• Roses grown on their own roots have no graft union. Plant those at the same depth they were growing in the nursery.

Common mistakes

• Planting with the graft union proud of the soil — It exposes the union to frost and windrock and encourages rootstock suckers, which are vigorous, flower poorly and eventually take over the plant.
• Digging a narrow hole and folding the roots to fit — Bent and circling roots do not straighten out afterwards. The hole is dug to fit the roots, not the other way round.
• Filling the hole with bought compost — The roots stay in the enriched pocket instead of spreading into the surrounding soil, so the plant never anchors properly or finds its own water.
• Letting the roots dry out on the way to the hole — Bare roots exposed to wind and sun for even half an hour lose fine root hairs. Keep them in the bucket or wrapped until the moment they go in.

Questions people ask