Hi Catsrose: I would love to see your photos & your garden. The camera I use is Olympus that my hubby bought at Sam's club. In my last house of acidic clay, mulched with pine bark (pH of 5.4, if wet goes down to 3.8) .... all my hybrid teas grafted on Dr. Huey were BS-fest. Now I realize that Dr. Huey likes it DRY and alkaline. Here's what I wrote in the thread, "Your most healthy and no-spray roses?" Someone asked if own-root is healthier. My answer is yes, since it's easier to find an own-root suitable for one's soil and climate, than to make Dr. Huey works for all types. Here's why: 1) Tammy in TN with acidic red clay & good rainfall reported GRAFTED on Dr. Huey's decline in her soil. 2) I put a Knock-out grafted on Dr. Huey in a wet alkaline clay. That went downhill. I moved it, and put an own-root Romantica Sweet Promise, always healthy, gave me 70+ blooms in 1st year. 3) I planted an grafted HT Heirloom in a pot. It's clean in that dry pot, until I moved into a wet bed, topped with acidic leaves ... broke out in BS instantly. I dug that up, and Dr. Huey's root shrank. 4) I killed a Knock-out grafted on Dr. Huey in that wet bed ... Dr. Huey gone, and it grew own-root. Compare that to my killing a Knock-out in a DRY SPOT: it has both Dr. Huey and own-root together. However, it broke out in cercospora fungal infestation after week-long rain in the fall. Cercospora is much smaller dots than black spots. See picture below of that Knock-out: I moved plenty of roses in my zone 5a garden. The difference between own-root and grafted-on-Dr.Huey: Own-root spread outs, some horizontally from the main trunk, and can survive wetness better. It's more efficient to transport water from a spreading root. Roses bloom better if trained sideway, rather than upward. Sap and nutrients flow better if it doesn't have to fight gravity. Grafted roots have to go UP through a bud union, it's not an efficient water-transport system of HAVING TO PASS through that knob, esp. when that bud union is damaged by winter or acidity. Grafted-on-Dr. Huey is great for a dry climate like CA. Dr. Huey can go through rock-hard clay better than my shovel. However, Dr. Huey declines if buried deep in a cold zone, or in acidic soil. In my last house of acidic clay, I dug up a dozen BS-fest grafted hybrid teas, all roots shrank. Compare that to my moving own-roots in my alkaline clay, and finding them much bigger with time. Own-roots bloom earlier too. Knock-outs grafted on Dr. Huey are slower to bloom, Dr. Huey is hardy to zone 6b, and not below 5b like some own-roots.

I think Max had previously resolved to ignore some BS on 'Rose de Resht' in order to enjoy its wonderful and incomparably scented blooms - it's a very tough rose in spite of the disease, even if that's a fairly big problem. I don't know of another rose with that fragrance. 'Fortune's Five-Colored Rose' and 'Old Blush' have been consistently good here, with 'Cramoisi Superieur' showing obvious signs of blackspot (10-20%) in a fairly moist environment without really going under. Some others you might really enjoy include 'Bengal Fire', which might simply be synonymous with 'Sanguinea' (I'd love to know more about that - Niche Gardens sells the one I'm talking about, for clarity's sake), which can out-Knock-Out Knock Out any day of the week with its shockingly immaculate leaves all season long. It's almost worth growing as a foliage plants for those drop-dead gorgeous leaden leaves. Spice is another one with fab resistance to black spot. Japanese beetles tend to chew the flowers of most of these roses into tattered bits during the prime beetle season, but they haven't really done much damage to rose leaves around here. I would say that 'Mutabilis' makes their floral damage seem less obvious than some roses like Bengal Fire, either through sheer brute overproduction, or perhaps it's something about those twinkling colors, like some sort of macroscopic confetti, that utterly charms and fools the eye.

Hi, Maurizio, Once again you have given us a wonderful picture of the Asian-derived roses that excel in our Mediterranean climate. Thank you so much. I quote Rehder and Wilson's description of Rosa odorata var. gigantea f. erubescens from Plantae Wilsonianae, p. 339 which we now have available to download courtesy of the Missouri Botanical Garden at botanicus.org: "Rosa odorata var. gigantea f. erubescens Rehder & Wilson, n. comb. Rosa gigantea f. erubescens Focke Yunnan: Lichiang valley, alt. 2500 m., May 1906, G. Forrest (No. 2049); Tali valley, alt. 2000-2400 m., May 1906, G. Forrest (No. 4452). This form differs from [Rosa odorata var. gigantea] in its pale pink often somewhat smaller flowers." I haven't read Focke's description, but Rehder and Wilson describe the color as pale pink, nothing reddish. I'll check a later Rehder description in Bailey's to see if he shifted to a darker memory of the rose. But you point out what I think is the importance of this form of Gigantea: its smaller, shrubbier size at the extreme northern range of the species. This is nicely summarized in Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy In The British Isles: "R. gigantea, in its typical state, extends into the southern parts of the Chinese province of Yunnan. But of greater interest are the forms collected by Forrest in central and norther-western Yunnan, which are of smaller stature than R. gigantea of Burma, even shrubs no more than 5 ft high, with fragrant flowers in shades of pale yellow or rose....It is perhaps these Yunnan forms, which Forrest found both wild and cultivated, that gave rise to the tea-scented roses of Chinese gardens...." This helps explain why so many of our Tea roses bear so many Gigantea characters, from drooping, mahogany colored foliage to evergreen foliage. Sorry for the diversion. I agree that Bengal Fire resembles Sanguinea, something unique in the blooms that reminds me of Dali's Persistence of Memory and those long, narrow, extremely graceful buds that are unmistakable.

OK. the trump card the proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why FAR more warm summer plants can tolerate cool summers, than cool summer plants can tolerate warm summers...is glacial refugia. Let's compare the East Coast to the Pacific Coast. In the last Ice Age, the glaciers came about as far south as central Pennsylvania. The currently warm summer areas in the mid-Atlantic and upper South would obviously have had much, much cooler summers, in addition to colder winters. On the Pacific coast, they only went as far south as roughly the WA/OR border. The climate of a place like San Francisco no doubt got a bit colder, but not much. At worst, it might have gotten as cool as Seattle. But guess what...both places have cool summers now. It didn't make a difference if San Francisco had slightly cooler summers, they already are cool - the plants did not require any adaptation! OTOH, the plants of the Southeast had to adapt to much cooler summers. Hence the reason most Southeastern shrubs will grow just fine in the UK, assuming the winters aren't too cold, but very few shrubs from the world's maritime climates can grow in the Southeastern USA. There's no reason to think there would be ancestral/inactive genes in those plants to tolerate warm summers, because they never had to tolerate them. OTOH, warm summer climate plants have had to tolerate cooler summers during glacial periods. This post was edited by davidrt28 on Fri, Nov 30, 12 at 19:55