When to plant roses?
- Botanical name
- Rosa
- Family
- Rosaceae
Roses are planted from October to March.
Roses are woody perennials. The edible part is the fruit.
The time of the cut depends on whether a rose flowers several times a year or only once. Hybrid teas, floribundas and ground cover roses flower repeatedly and are cut when the shoots are just starting away after winter. Once flowering shrub roses flower from buds made the year before, so their turn comes after the flowering ends.
Bare root roses, plants sold without soil, reach the market only during dormancy. Such a plant goes into the ground as soon as it comes home. The one reason to wait is frozen or waterlogged soil.
The roots of a rose reach deep and a rooted bush mostly gets by on the moisture already in the soil. Water is needed in a long summer heat and drought and on sandy soil. It then comes rarely and in quantity, 5 to 10 litres a week.
Roses through the year
- planting
- pruning (repeat-flowering)
- pruning (once-flowering)
In short
Growing conditions
Are roses toxic to cats and dogs?
No. Roses are not toxic to cats and dogs.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- A white, floury coating spreads over the leaves, first on the lower and older ones. The leaf under it yellows and dries up. The fruit stays small, because the plant loses leaf surface.
- Prevention
- Plant resistant varieties, leave an airy spacing and sun, and clear the debris at the end of the season. Unlike most fungi it is not helped by wet foliage, since it spreads in heat and high air humidity, in a dry summer too.
- What to do
- Oil products meant for powdery mildew on the squash family work on contact. They do not cure a leaf that is already affected, but they stop the spread to healthy ones. On herbs cut the affected shoots back instead, since the new growth comes clean. On ornamental perennials what is left is spacing and moisture.
- Signs
- On the leaves there are purple to black spots, with the leaf yellowing around them. The leaves drop early and the bush stands bare by midsummer. The weakened plant flowers less well the following year.
- Prevention
- The fungus overwinters on fallen leaves and in dormant infections on young shoots and buds. In autumn pick up and remove the fallen leaves or bury them under mulch, in winter pick off the leaves that stay on the bush as well, and in spring, before the leaves come out, cut out every spotted part of the shoots. This only delays the start of the disease, because the spores arrive with the rain from elsewhere.
- What to do
- Do not use fungicides. What is left is cleared leaves, cutting out the spotted shoots in spring and the choice of variety. The resistance of a new variety usually does not hold for long, because new strains of the fungus turn up. The old species roses are the least affected.
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Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Rosaceae).
Sources about the plant: ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 30 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: Clemson Cooperative Extension, KGZS, UF/IFAS Extension, University of Maryland Extension, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, Utah State University Extension.