68 PIOTORIAL PRACTICAL ROSE GROWING. 
When the head has been formed the pruner will have a 
simple task. His object will be to keep the tree well furnished 
with young, ripe wood, and to this end he should remove all 
growths which are old and weak, or soft, or which tend to 
cause crowding. With a limited number of branches, thinly 
disposed, and only pruned to the extent of removing unripe 
tips or thick side growth, there is no fear of a lack of flowers. 
It must be remembered, however, that when the head is 
once formed wholesale cutting back will be fatal to free 
flowering. 
Pruning Penzance Briers. 
No modern Rose garden is complete without its Penzance 
Briers. Beautiful in blossom, attractive later in the season 
owing to their brightly coloured heps, graceful in growth, sweet- 
leaved, the lovely race of garden Roses evolved by Lord Pen- 
zance from the common Sweet Brier, Rosa rubiginosa, is one 
that must grow in favour as the years roll on. 
The common advice to avoid pruning Penzance Briers is 
based on a sound principle. Assuredly these lovely Roses 
must not be pruned as dwarf and standard Roses for exhibi- 
tion are pruned—that is, cut to within a few eyes of the soil. 
Such procedure could have but one result—the production of 
gross, unripe, flowerless wood. 
Nevertheless, it can hardly be maintained that it is advis- 
able to leave plants absolutely untouched with the knife year 
after year. Such a line of action—or rather inaction—would 
result in a thicket of growth, much of which, being weak and 
immature on the one hand or old and worn out on the other, 
would produce few and poor flowers. 
To secure pyramids of bloom—tall columns clothed from 
top to bottom with flowers—a modified long-rod system of 
paneice is the best. Any reader who has a bed of Penzance 
riers in full bloom in his garden (and I, as I write, am in that 
happy position) will observe that flowers are borne not only 
(References to Fig. 31, page 69.) 
PICTORIAL PRACTICE.—PLAIN HINTS IN FEW WORDS 
FIG. 31—PRUNING WEEPING ROSES. 
A, one year old head of Noisette Rose Aimée Vibert on the Brier stock: « 
stem of stock ; 4, main growth from the bud, cut back at the first prun- 
ing to three buds; e¢, vigorous shoots produced as a result of the head- 
ing ; d, points of shortening to secure bloom the following summer, and 
also vigorous growths for increasing the head. The dotted cross lines 
near the head of the stock indicate the points of pruning when it is 
desired to originate long shoots for flowering the following year. ‘They 
should be bent down as indicated by the dotted drooping lines, only the 
unripe points being removed, After flowering on short growths their 
