My rose is healthy and leafy but barely flowers. Why?

A vigorous rose that will not flower almost always points at one of four things, and they are easy to tell apart.

Too much nitrogen is the most common. Lawn feed drifting into a nearby border, or a general fertiliser used too generously, produces exactly this picture: abundant dark green foliage, long soft shoots, very few buds. Roses need potassium for flowering; switch to a rose or tomato feed and stop any high-nitrogen application nearby.

Insufficient light is the next. Roses want at least six hours of direct sun. A rose that was well placed ten years ago may now be shaded by a tree or hedge that has grown up around it, and the decline is gradual enough that the cause is easy to miss.

Wrong pruning accounts for many cases, and the direction of the mistake depends on type. Cutting a rambler or an old once-flowering shrub rose hard in winter removes precisely the wood that would have flowered. Conversely, never pruning a hybrid tea leaves it as a mass of old unproductive stems.

Suckering from the rootstock is the fourth. Most garden roses are grafted; if growth is coming from below the graft union it belongs to the rootstock, which is vigorous and either flowers poorly or produces small wild-type flowers, and it will progressively outcompete the named variety. Trace suckers back to their origin and pull rather than cut them off.

Beyond those: a first year after planting is often flowerless while the plant establishes, and drought stress at bud-formation time causes buds to abort. Neither needs intervention beyond patience and consistent watering.