How To Grow Beautiful Roses Using Cuttings

If your home gardening efforts have been modest thus far, and you’d rather not just plunge straight into rose growing without easing in gently, you might get some experience in how to grow roses by starting with cuttings. If you have a friend with some roses, perhaps they’d be willing to give you a few stems so you can try to start some in this way. This could be an enjoyable experiment, both in growing roses a bit differently than most people do, but also in gauging whether you have a knack for rose growing.

Some roses work better for this than others. The hybrid tea rose, for example, might be more difficult to propagate by this means, as will Gallica roses. And unfortunately, most of the roses that come from florists will not be amenable to this version of how to grow roses, because of the way they themselves were produced. Floribundas and many others that are actually garden roses do much better, and miniature roses are usually grown this way.

You should do the rose pruning in early spring, taking three or four six-inch stems (or for miniatures, three-inch stems). Cut them on a slight diagonal, in the morning before the stresses of the day. In the past, people knew how to grow roses with cuttings protected by Mason jars, and the practice still works well. So once you have your cuttings, take off the bottom leaves, with just a few at the top, and dip the stems into a rooting powder. Then set them either into your garden soil or into containers of potting soil. At this point, place a Mason jar over each stem and water now and then over the next few weeks.

How to grow roses from cuttings might vary slightly in different regions, depending on the climate. For example, in a warmer location you might just skip the Mason jar altogether and root your stems in the soil of your garden outside. In a cooler climate, you might want all the help you can get, with an indoor container and Mason jar, or with a heating pad under the container. You can probably find gardening tips from a local rose society or the internet to help you decide on your exact procedure. And if you succeed at starting a new rose plant from a cutting, then this may encourage you to go farther, and get into rose growing in a serious way.