Rose Trellises

We've been meaning to do this for quite some time, and this weekend Kirk finished making trellises for the climbing roses in the perennial border:

Kirk bought a few cedar boards and ripped them down into 1.5-inch strips. He cut dadoes into the crosspieces to attach them, and each trellis is hung on the house using a custom bracket cut on the jigsaw from pressure-treated pine (painted white to match the house trim):

It was much trickier to prune and train the roses, since our climbers are very thorny, but we managed to do it without too much bloodshed:

We had a lot of die-back on our rose canes this winter since they were crushed under the weight of so much snow for so long. That might actually be good for us, since we'll have a chance to train pliable, new canes instead of dealing with old, woody ones.

This is just one set of trellises; there are others on the other corner of the porch. I'm excited to see the roses leaf out and bloom so we can see that red color rising above everything else in the perennial border the way it was originally designed to!