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Very useful comments with your photos, thanks. It might be worth your while trying for a better clone of Honorine, though: in my no-spray garden (zone 9b, dry summers) it gets a bit of black spot but doesn't defoliate, and it repeats.
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Thank you, Margaret. Your commentary throughout HMF has been so useful to this novice gardener. You are right that I should grow some other Honorine de Brabant clones to compare performance. She is one of my favorites and I certainly wouldn't mind having a few more scattered throughout our gardens.
Do you prune your Honorine de Brabant?
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Thank you! Honorine has been the best performer of the striped remontants in my garden (the others have been hoicked).
Er, no, pruning is something I don't get around to, much! I remove most flower buds from young plants in their first summer, and find it makes an impressive difference to how well the rose establishes itself and covers itself to the ground. I intend to do a hygiene prune each winter (remove dead wood and crossing-over branches), which would be much easier if I also did as intended and dead-headed through the season. In theory, I would remove a maximum of 1/3 of the bush every few years, but Honorine isn't blocking any paths, so she largely escapes. I get away with laziness because I don't grow many HTs, I'm not aiming for showbench roses, and we don't get winter snow, all of which determined the style of pruning widely taught. I have a few early HTs and floribundas, and they make splendid shrubs if not cut back hard each winter.
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