People soon won’t be able to stop and smell the roses in front of the Santa Barbara Mission, but only temporarily.
Volunteers and city employees will trim the flowers in the approximately 1-acre garden during the annual rose pruning day on Saturday to prepare for spring bloom.
The volunteer day will run from 9 a.m. to noon at the A.C. Postel Memorial Rose Garden.
No gardening experience is necessary, and Santa Barbara Rose Society member Dan Bifano will demonstrate proper pruning techniques.
People are advised to bring their own gardening tools but, there will be some available.
“It is a wonderful opportunity for people to come out and practice on somebody else’s roses before they do their own,” Bifano said.
Some roses, however, were already cut back Wednesday as some volunteers got an early start.
Volunteer Rita Feeley said she spent more than two hours tending to her adopted garden bed. It was her fourth time pruning the roses, and she said she loves to volunteer to meet people.
Bifano, who has been providing demonstrations for the volunteer day for the past 40 years, said he enjoys giving demonstrations to impart his rose knowledge.
He grew up taking care of roses, tending to his parents’ rose garden in Montecito.
“I was taken by the roses, and I have had a rose garden almost everywhere I have lived,” he said.
Bifano said the best pruning technique is to trim off from green stems and to look for stems the size of a pencil, avoiding stems that are too short.
Parks supervisor Todd Newell also took a stroll through the garden on Wednesday to see what needed to be done before the volunteer day and to assess how wet the ground was following the recent rainstorms.
Even with the three hours dedicated to pruning the flowers, Newell said completely pruning all of the bushes will take longer than that.
“But for most people, that’s a good enough time frame for them to be here,” he added. “There’s still a lot of cleanup we have to do on the city side afterwards.”
Newell estimates that all of the roses will be pruned by early next week as city staff revisit the garden to ensure that the plants are properly trimmed and to clean up debris.
To the average person, it might seem like pruning the roses is getting rid of the flowers, but Bifano said it is actually waking up the roses.
“Within a couple of weeks, you’ll see complete coverage of foliage because they are ready to send out new growth for their spring bloom,” he said.
Following the pruning, city parks employees will begin with a fertilization process to get the roses to bloom again in April.
Newell said he appreciates the volunteers and encourages anyone who is interested to stop by on Saturday morning.
For more information about the volunteer day, click here.