I'm afraid it's another sign of how homogeneous everything is becoming in America. Personality and individuality are being stamped out by the few big corporations that rule the marketplace. It's up to us not to give in to that, to find the little places that are still somehow hanging in there and selling old roses, and vintage jewelry and organic produce and handmade items. It takes a bit of searching but they're out there as long as we continue to look for them and buy their products. It is what it is and for the most part it's out of our hands. But not completely......

Ingrid

Same story last year, at Lowe's. They had mostly knock out roses...with one wonderful exception. Someone ordered John Cabot roses! I bought two, came back for two more...and they were on clearance for $3 each. I'd have bought more, if there had been more room in my garden! :)

Aggressive corporate consolidation has been going on in the USA for the last 30 years, ever since Reagan decided not to meaningfully enforce the anti-trust laws.

I agree that the way to go is specialty nurseries, if you want more than generic hybrid teas, floribundas, & Knockouts.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but regardless, if you what you want is something more suited to your particular climate, a specialty nursery is much more likely to carry it.

Keep buying those old roses, and preaching their virtues! And don't forget to propagate and swap and give lots of cuttings and plants. Your garden is others' chance to see a different way to do it.

As long as you don't import, without permit, rose cuttings from other countries.

(Other countries, especially on other continents, deal with rose maladies we in the USA don't yet have and it would be much better if it stayed that way.)

I'm sure Melissa was saying that we give away rose cuttings to people LOCALLY. That's where they would be most likely to grow well anyway. Besides, it's ILLEGAL to import without a permit. I'm sure none of us fancy any jail time.

I was just in a local nursery--not a big box store and they had a few roses from last year on clearance. They had a few Caldwell Pink and a Mutabilis. I recommended them to a dear lady who works there. As soon as I said the word, "rose", she was very hesitant and said she didn't want anything she had to spray. Sadly, it seems most people think of roses in two groups--"real" roses that take way too much care and knockouts. For most people that I know, OGRs don't seem to exist. Still, I'm trying to change that.

Thanks, gardennatlanta: that's exactly what I meant. The European Union does have a few people who share my interest in old and older roses. And I certainly don't want to import RRD into Europe on smuggled cuttings--a thought to send chills down any rose lover's spine.
To go back to my original point, a group of dedicated rose lovers can enrich each others' gardens greatly, as I know from my own experiences. I have a lot of home-propagated roses. They could enrich other people's gardens as well, if those people cared. The problem is that most people simply aren't interested in roses, old roses, and most of all not interested in once-blooming old roses. Every time I face this (maddening) reality I decide anew that I will fill my garden with all the beautiful plants no one cares to grow. Currently I'm working on what a large order of lilacs for this fall.
Melissa

No Melissa, I don't want RRD here or some of the types of mildew that we haven't seen yet or Japanese beetles and red spider mites whatever they may be. I had four roses from the US last Sunday and I am a bit nervous and will keep them in pots over the summer hoping that will be enough time to spot any foreign diseases or pests.

I was at Lowes on Sunday and they now have Knockouts in bodybags. I was looking at them and a man picked up a few. He asked me if they were good. I asked him how many roses he wanted to have. He answered 5. I told him to buy 10 just to be sure. I explained why we call them 'body bags' and told him he'd probably be better off buying the potted knockouts.

This is why roses get such a bad name.

Big boxes and chain stores are not nurseries, except in a case where a chain only sells nursery goods. If you want to see what trends in buying are being exhibited by the segment of the market that does not consider plants to be just another landscape object, with no interest in being presented with a full selection - price being the prime consideration - then you have to go to actual nurseries. Usually these are independently owned and operated and consist of one or two locations at most.

That being said, the real garden centers here have clearly cut way back on the amount of roses being stocked in recent years. But additional contraction of the offering could still occur and it would just take us back to the way it always was before old garden roses etc. caught on some years ago. Apparently that fad has passed.

Armstrong nursery (a smaller chain in SoCa) also has gotten less roses in than in previous years and it seems to be the same with Walter Anderson nursery (an individual owned nursery, with only two locations). I guess it is the same here, people just don't buy that many roses anymore. We have water restrictions and water is relatively expensive, which certainly contributes to the fact that a lot of folks seem to be shying away from roses.

What most of you wrote just makes it clear to me that it is so important, that we buy from the small, mostly online rose nurseries and talk as many people as we can reach into buying easy-to-grow and disease resistant roses in the climate we live in (OGRs of course, but also moderns in my opinion). This seems to be the only way to keep the resources for a variety of roses to choose from alive. I also think planting roses in the front yard where people actually can see them, giving fragrant freshly cut roses from our own gardens away, and invite people over for garden tours might be helpful. I certainly believe that our own actions have an influence in the world!

Christina

Here is a link that might be useful: Organic Garden Dreams

Even my local nurseries are utilizing huge amounts of real estate for KOs. I have a few KOs and like them for what they are, but I wonder what this nursery is not stocking on that same real estate the KOs are taking up. I just hate to see where this plague-like invasion is headed. They're in it to make a profit though so I do understand.

Well, you all know what I think about Knock-Out's.....but, as someone told me, if you think of them as a shrub instead of a rose, then they're just fine.

Now if we could get nurseries to quit STOCKING them as ROSES so that they stocked other cultivars as roses, then we'd be good to go.

If we could just make another name for KnockOut's and the like.... maybe call them "KO's"? As in "Got any KO's for sale? No? How about some ROSES?"

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Musings Blog re: Knockout.

I have a yearly plant sale where I sell potted annuals I grew from seed ( I like to try different seeds but don't have room to grow all the seed that germinates ). I always offer little antique roses in 1 gallon pots and give tours of the blooming roses in the yard. Putting out catalogs from rose nurseries encourages people to copy down the websites names. My favorite memory was a lady who was completely taken by the scent of an Ambridge rose blossom and said it was the finest perfume she ever smelled. I gave her 8 blossoms and the name and the DA website name. She couldn't believe I would just give a stranger that many roses.

There are so few roses left on my block now. Most were planted years ago and are old, woody and virused. Work crews that mow and go hit them with string trimmers and herbicides. They get butchered at "pruning time" by these same fellows. I put mulch down on my neighbors long suffering plants and the weekly crew raked it away with the leaves leaving the ground bare again.

I don't wonder that the stores offer only the toughest and easiest plants...they survive the crews.

One thing I can say for KOs is they're replacing all those ugly HT blooming sticks. There's a house in my neighborhood that has the ugliest rose planted in the yard. Every year it produces about 4 fat garish tangerine blooms on three 5-ft leafless sticks, all leaning drunkenly to one side. Literally, it looks like some type of alien fungus. Every year I dream of sneaking over in the dead of night and replacing it with something, even a KO.

I spent some time and thought to make handcrafted name tags for a women's function at our church. The sweet woman who is the head of the women's ministry is in her 30's and wistfully told me that her generation has never learned or has forgotten the niceties of life like hand crafted name tags, handwritten thank you notes and letters.

Do you think there is a link to gardening with roses there? Do you think that what she said is true?

Dunno, but we all need to take a look at how we spend our times, and keep an eye on how our children are spending theirs as well. The amount of time my daughter can spend in front of a screen is strictly--well, semi-strictly--rationed, and has to be earned by music practice. I give this as an example.
Gardening is certainly the slow activity par excellence, requiring both patience and an ability to appreciate what the present moment offers. You may well be right that there's a connection.
Melissa

Thank-you notes seem to have gone the way of gentler times. I gave my step-niece $100 last year when she graduated from Beauty school and the most I received in the way of a thank-you was a vague note posted on her FaceBook wall that said 'thanks to all who came to my party and donated towards my education'.
Classy, right? And she is a 26-year old woman.