The habit suggests it's a Gallica. The height and the suckering... Now if it grows best in sandy soils in drainage ditches, that would fit gallicas as well.

About the mossing: I don't remember where I picked this idea it (it wasn't original with me) but something about the mossing coming from/ appearing in two different classes of roses. Does this strike a chord with wnyone else?

That’s convenient you have a ’Pelisson’ for comparison, Melissa. Your collection is impressive! So, Damask perfume, brilliant pink, and those daunting bristles…the mystery continues. Thank you for the spring welcome! Someday, I’ll show up for fall, winter and early spring threads. :) Carol

Huh. I added a final comment that for some reason didn't post. 'Pélisson' is about 1 1/2 feet/45cm tall, NOT 20cm!!! Conversion failure.

Hello to you, Carol! I always enjoy your old rose threads, though, having posted extensively last year, I may not contribute to this round. I hope you and yours are doing well.

This chronic fatigue is a pain. My couple of hours of piddling around in the garden yesterday morning cost me the rest of the day. I couldn't get warm again for hours, and once I did warm up, couldn't get myself off the sofa before finally going off to bed.

I’ve lived in Spain since 2005 (in Andalucia and now Catalonia) and very rarely come across any antique roses. My theory is that they were largely abandoned after the introduction of the Hybrid Tea, since thats mostly all I see on sale in garden centres and planted in gardens. Until recently, variety wasn’t even identified, just labelled ’red rose’ with a smattering of ‘pink, white, orange’ etc. roses.

The situation is improving because in the last couple of years its possible to stumble across named varieties, mostly from Meilland, Kordes and Poulson and even the odd David Austin. La Sevillana is the public landscape rose of choice and can be seen everywhere. The Spanish seem very traditional in their rose choices, tradition meaning HTs and landscape roses nowadays. Perhaps variety is better in Madrid and other places.

Damask roses were clearly grown in the past, since a very old specimen I recently came across growing next to an old ruined farmhouse was identified as a damask by Melissa and Marlorena, possibly Kazanlik. Other than that, I have spied one gallica (in an hotel owned by expats) one Mutabilis (another very old farmhouse) and a few rosa rugosas near the coast.

I’ve never come across any antique rose groups/enthusiasts, but there must be some out there somewhere and I would love to find them. After extensive trawlling of Spanish search engines I did find two specialist suppliers and will try and support them in future, rather than buying from Loubert in France..

https://elnougarden.com/collections/rosales-de-coleccion-rosales-antiguos?page=1

https://gardencenterejea.com/606-rosas-antiguas-y-de-coleccion

There’s no rhyme or reason to it ...but there are times it can be predicted:

If there are severely infected roses upwind, especially in late summer when the vector mite populations multiply exponentially (these have been counted by two different scientists in two non-adjacent states). your roses are then under increased disease pressure.

Couple the wind direction with the aerodynamics of your growing area: if the wind go whipping through a narrow walkway, the mites are less likely to be dropped on plants. The mites have NO wings, They depend on wind to move them and they are so small and light that they only drop where the wind slows (going over a wall, for example). Up against a wall that gets hit by wind.

You may also see something in Knock Outs that is really subtle: a slightly different shade of green on leaves. Not the chlorotic sickly green (that happens, too), but a different dark green. Sometimes that will stand out in a mass planting.

Ann

Prairiemom, both … it’s still just too risky now in my area. I don’t currently have any roses.

If you want to have a few roses (5 or 6?) you could buy a screened in cage that zips/unzips and put some in there. The mites couldn't get through the mesh...I don't think anyway.

@stillanntn6b I'm not sure which number you called, but I have had the most luck calling Mr. James's cell phone number first thing in the morning. The number is listed on their website if you go to the About tab, scroll down to Contact, then scroll down on that page and you will see an office number and a James Mills number. I don't know if they will be open or not, but they are pretty consistently open even on holidays when I have visited such as President's Day and Columbus Day. I wish you luck and hope you are able to grab all that is on your wishlist. Please share pics with us!

Well, this has been an interesting ordeal for me for sure, this ordering with K and M Roses… so I tried on Friday to call Megan, who handles the orders, and wasn’t able to reach her. Tried again on Monday. Ditto. I thought, ok, I’m just about done trying. An hour later, Megan calls me back. I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll say this, in the end, she has bent over backward to help me. I can tell she felt bad for all the difficulty I’ve had trying to order with them. Pretty Jessica was my biggest reason for ordering from them and I really needed two. She could only find one, but she was determined and eventually found a very small second one that she is going to pamper and baby for me a few weeks before she sends them along with my Prospero and Tamora. Obviously, I don’t have my plants yet, so I can’t give a review on them, but I do feel very happy so far, even though it took three and a half weeks to get here!

Late to the wake, and first how to tell a rose from a bramble: look at the base of the compound leaf. Roses have stipules which are two skinny little leave-like growths on opposite sides of the base of the compound leaf. Brambles don't have stipules.

Multiflora flowers are always surrounded by other multiflora flowers on the same stem; the petals are only white for a day before they start to die and turn brownish.

Now about your sick drift roses. If those were mine, I'd isolate them from my other roses immediately . When I look at roses, I want (ok, really I don't want) to see three symptoms. when I compare the leaf margins, when I look at the spacing of leaves on a cane (so dense that that's why the name rosette got applied) the slowness of the green pigment emerging.

That's three and that's just a start, One of the pix shows an almost circular distortion and that happens with RRD when one side of a stem is sickER and grows even faster than the other side.

But there's yet another thing: powdery mildew. Multiflora is famous and beloved for not getting powdery mildew. Even Epstein and Hill mention in their main RRD paper that multiflora with RRD also gets powdery mildew. Why? Don't know. But I do know my garden's susceptibility to PM (which is low except for years when we get a late freeze and the roses that survive that often have PM when they have never had it before). So when I see PM on a rose I look really hard to makes sure there are no other symptoms that I associate with RRd.

IS there a proven preventive solution? I don't know for sure.

I know air flow always drops mites in certain places- so don't replant where you've consistently lost roses to RRd.

Nature gives us thrips to destroy the beauty of rose petals. If we get lucky, the other kinds of thrips that are predaceous thrips will have populations that grow as their food source grows, and predaceous thrips will eat mites (size matters when you are searching for something slightly smaller than you are for food).

Try to figure out air flow. Look up wind for multiflora growing in untended fields or along highways that haven't been cut back and are about twenty years older (on at least one side).

Do you have other questions?

Have you read my ebook It's old-ish but it's based on years of my observations.

Ann

Artist - have you read Ann's ebook? She's our resident RRD guru. If you have a specific question, I'll get her attention back to here...but you should probably read her ebook first. :) :) I'm sorry you're going through this. It seems hopeless right now...but you'll move through this with a bit more knowledge. Hang in there. <3 <3

I am in the process of reading it.

@stillanntn6b that's the old "pegging" style used in Victorian and Georgian Britain by the "landed gentry" gardeners using HPs. Sometimes they were simply pegged to the ground so the canes developed the laterals better known on climbing roses. Sometimes literal forms were employed. The physical training and grooming of the pegged roses was only one part of the labor equation. Imagine the back breaking maintenance of keeping the grass and weeds clipped from among the horizontally trained rose canes laying splayed across the lawn. There weren't weed whackers then and no animal grazing could be employed as the roses would have been the main course.

Mine, early on in this garden, was a martyr to powdery mildew, but I would likely be better at siting it now, if I tried again, knowing better what my microclimates and other conditions are. Lovely!

A similar story came from Jean (who has posted here) over in Nashville. She lives in a long established neighborhood east of downtown and grows roses. The area has been civilized long enough that really unpleasant weeds had no homes there.

Then they had a tornado. Houses were left standing (goodly).

But next spring thistles came up in everybodys' yards. They had never had thistle problems before.

Storms just keep on giving.

I'm not sure. His dam is half Lamancha & half Nigerian Dwarf (mini lamancha). Usually their babies will have small elf or gopher ears. Every once in a while they have one with Nigerian ears. The other Mini Lamancha does dont usually care one way or another. He was the first baby born. He was alraedy out when I got out to the barn and she was butting him. We tried different methods of getting them to bond. She wanted nothing to do with him lol. Then she had another one with tiny ears like her. She loves that one.

That is the first baby we've had that was rejected. His ears straightened out and look normal now. He is doing great and is weaned now.

I had pulled the other 2 bucklings from their mom because the mom had 4. I left the 2 doelings on her.

Oh that makes my heart hurt, Sultry

Elf Rosa touched on something that's important: everybody is talking about roses but noses are even more important.

Allergies, pollutants, and even temperature can make major difference. I didn't think I could smell tea roses. Heck, I couldn't full stop. Then I had the encounter with several wasps or yellow jackets (couldn't tell which, just felt them, and several stings per.) So I combined baking soda poltices with several benadryl. Later that afternoon I wandered through a non-biting part of the garden and low and behold, the tea bed smelled wonderful. For me, it was the first and only time.

Temperature in hot and humid places like the ARS garden in Shreveport makes major differences in rose scent. Many of their beds have lots of plants of one cultivar. What we learned there was 1) visit early morning- elsewise move from patch of shade to patch of shade and 2) roses that smelled lovely at 9am were nothing two hours later.

I believe Heirloom roses currently has Madam Anisette as own root! I’m thinking of ordering it in fear it might not be available in future years. MA did have a bit longer rest in between flushes for me compared to others however, her blooms didn’t become small in the heat like Summer Romance etc. she did get a bit tall but, I also don’t prune back too hard. I truly love her and think she’s worth having if you’re into fragrance.

Sultry - Screaming Goat Baby...wouldn't that be a weird rose name. lol Yes, I'd love to find a Madame Anisette next year. :) :) Now that's the kind of rose that I love...you have to stop and smell every open bloom!!! Chandos Beauty was such a rose to me. :)

KS - that sounds like a delicious-smelling peony.

HU - let us know if you get one. :)

Here, there are at least four different emitter volumns; and they are color coded.

Set up four with glasses or empty plastic jugs under them and see if they all fill at the same amount for ten minutes.

Are you on a well ? if so how does it pump before it starts to gasp?

I’ve tested emitters with unknown flow rates by placing them over or in a bucket and running them for a set amount of time and measuring the result. Then multiply time and emitters until you have the amount you want. This is trickier if the flow is variable - I suspect a gravity system will vary as it gets further from the source so you may want to take a few measurements at different locations and adjust accordingly.

Thanks, Heather. I've been doing some research, and, indeed, it DOES seem to be very tricky-apparently even with a "normal" system. Mine is even more complicated by the fact that my garden is on a sharp slope. The areas in which I'm installing drip are relatively flat, considering the site as a whole, but stil sloping.

To make matters worse, I found a forum on which a pro points that if you give plants that famous "one inch of water per week" (or is it two? in any case, I find this profoundly irritating),you are watering them shallowly, which is a BIG no-no. To deep water, you'd have to give them a full 8 inches or so! which I can't do.

For now, my soil is still quite humid, thanks to the rain. My hope this year is to try to keep the soil humid for as long as I can-building on the base that the rain has given me-by drip-watering. I hope to start today.