Cleaning Potted Perennials: Flower Carpet Roses

 

My Flower Carpet Roses successfully overwintered in our garage (crazy amount of buds on all three of them). Hurray! Since we've been experiencing some nice weather, I decided it was time to pull them out and slowly begin the cleaning process. I didn't really research the "proper" steps for cleaning shrub and Flower Carpet Roses, because they are pretty much care free if planted in ground... so I just followed my intuition which was to cut off all of the dead foliage, address any diseased or rotting canes, top dress with compost, water and start the hardening-off process.

The Flower Carpet Rose above is Scarlet, and it was the best preforming among the three I won from Tesselaar Plants - albeit not my favorite. *I could probably cut some of the inner canes out so the plant isn't so crowded, and cut some of the longer canes down... but I'd like to see how this experiment works itself out.

If you're curious, this rose was listed as Zone 5-10 but it survived a Zone 4b Minnesotan winter (our coldest in 30 years) tucked in an attached garage; no additional protective covering.

I will continue to wheel them in and out of the garage for a few more days (so they can acclimate themselves) and in a few months I'll have some beautiful photos to share.

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I hope you consider growing a potted shrub rose or Flower Carpet Rose. It's really one of my favorite  additions to the garden - and totally unexpected (IMHO)!