Abraham Lincoln once wisely said – or wrote, I’m not sure which – “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” I had to keep reminding myself of this yesterday while pruning my “thorn bushes”. Surely, soon I shall be posting photos of my beautiful roses and sharing their stories. The blooms from Spring ’till the first Autumn freeze are well worth a few days of torture every March or April. However, I have resolved that any future rose selections for my garden will be less densely thorned than this beast which tore through my gloves and jeans. Oh, the things we do for beauty!
A Taste of Morning 
I have been procrastinating on pruning our roses each time I look at all those canes with throns!
Oscar
Another blogger pointed out to me that there are a lot of modern roses that aren’t so thorny, but I can’t see the point of pulling out roses that I love except for the one day a year that I prune them. Good luck with yours, Oscar!
Roses have been a much later addition to my garden so I was able to do a lot of research to find roses with less thorns and more fragrance. I am hoping that research pays dividends this spring.
I, too, hope that your research pays off. When I make plans for a new rose, I do research; but sometimes I just fall in love with a rose at a local nursery and … well, that’s my research : ) I’ll definitely be inspecting the canes from now on though! Good luck with your garden!
We’ve got a few like that – fierce blighters!
Ouch!
Yea, the things we do for beauty 😀 Love to see your rose photos.
Looking forward to having some new photos to share!
Well, there are many thornless roses nowaday though. It can be beautiful, fragrant and harmless.
I used to have a Zephrine Drouhin, which is thornless and quite lovely. But it only had one flush of flowers early summer … and well, it succumbed to disease. My hybrid teas and floribundas don’t seem quite as bad in the thorn department as my landscape and ground cover roses. Ouch! Do you have a favorite thornless variety?
Yes, I like my Rosa ‘Smooth Velvet’, it is completely thornless, good size flower and keep blooming from spring to it snows. You may see the pictures on my blog. You can grow rose from seed, if you plant the seed in the early spring, by end of summer or early fall it will flower!
Thank you for the tip. I shall look into Smooth Velvet. I have been focusing on fragrant varieties and I do have a number that are not quite as thorny as the one that I photographed, but I do have some that are quite bad in the thorn department, but very steady bloomers.