Who can resist the DA roses? I ordered Lady Emma Hamilton, Golden Celebration, Crown Princess Margareta, A Shropshire Lad. I getting myself used to the idea of spraying. What else can I do? They look stunning.

Yep, they are hard to resist. My 'Heritage' blooms like a maniac all season. I hope my two 'Pretty Jessica' roses follow the same path.

Randy

Hi Randy: How does your Heritage color hold? Does it fade to almost white? It is on the top 10 DA roses list, so it should be good. It is on my next year list. Also the Jude the Obscure which suppose to have a wonderful fragrance.

Tea Clipper - opens up to a nice, large quarter shape bloom with a button eye at the center. It has a nice apricot color but by the evening or the next day (depending how hot the weather is), the colour is washed out like the 2nd photo shown below . I usually cut those blooms off and enjoy them indoors instead. They look really lovely in a vase for about 2 days. The scent is always present - sometimes strong, but mostly medium / light.
I love it's growth habit - the canes are very long and lax. I don't prune them. I let them spill out of the pot. 1st year with me, and is already vigorous. Sadly, it doesn't bloom much- not as prolific compare to Heritage. See how it goes next year. However, Tea Clipper is still a lovely rose.
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Jude the Obscure has this strong, magnificent grapefruit, scent that is always present. Mine has RMV. I'm planning to get rid of it, and order another one later in the future, because currently I am bored with those cup-shaped blooms. The blooms of JtO look pretty, but I don't really like it's growth habbit - the canes are too thick, and usually when I dead-head the finished blooms, the overall appearance looks like a "broom-stick". Perhaps I should give Golden Celebration or maybe Jayne Austin a try.

'Tea Clipper' has large, beautiful flowers but didn't bloom much here in its first year. It has very few thorns and long (6-7') lax canes. We'll see how it does this year. I got a couple LEHs back in early January. They've leafed out and are doing well.

JumboJimmy, your photos of 'Tea Clipper' are really nice.
I bet you'd also like the plant habit of 'Golden Celebration', based upon your comments above. Mine has long, flexible canes that kind of arch over some. I guess I'm trying to say it's not a stiff looking plant. It's habit is relaxed and graceful in my opinion. Scent & color are extra, extra good.

Randy

Senko, to answer your question, yes, in the hot summer, 'Heritage' bloom color does lighten up quite a bit in the sun after the bloom has been open for a while. Below is a pic of my 'Heritage' during the summer. It is darker during the spring and fall, but still very softly colored. In my opinion, its blooms are incredibly beautiful, but if you are looking for a deeper color, this isn't your rose.

Randy

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Thanks Randy. Yes. I'm thinking of adding Golden Celebration this year. I saw it once at the Botanic garden, and I was really impressed by its colour and its growth habit. Jude is also another lovely rose - strong smell, and look great in a vase. However, 2nd year with me, I find the color of Jude too pale and the blooms don't really match the foliage well. Just my personal opinion here.

Thanks Randy for the beatiful picture of Heritage. I use strong colors in my garden. This rose has everything I am looking for except the strong color. But I will get one and use as white substitude. It is lovely and seems to deserve its spot. Realestate is expensive (even in this turndown market) and every plant has to deserve its spot.

Linrose, I don't know from where you got your (blanket) info on Austins, but the many I've been growing so far are certainly neither divas nor stingy with their blooms nor any less healthy than most other modern roses. Most of them are certainly a lot healthier, more vigorous and floriferous than many HT's, making fantastic garden plants.

On the three you asked about:

Lady Emma is a continuous bloomer with superb citrus-fruity scent similar to Jude the Obscure's, but a bit sweeter and more complex, absolutely delicious. Well behaved and wide growing, and in our temperate English climate practically evergreen (or ever-bronze, given the lovely color of its foliage). Catches some BS without spray but does not defoliate, and just keeps blooming and blooming. Quite amazing. This rose is a must for its beauty, scent and performance.

My Tea Clipper is entering its third season. Its repeat was not great in its first year, but improved noticeably in its second. The blooms are very beautiful when they first open, but they fade teribly fast, within a day or two, into a wishy-washy color, ending up a very light, washed-out yellow-beige with floppy petals. That has been disappointing. Scent is tea. The plant is enormously vigorous with few thorns and quite healthy, even in my no-spray garden.

Teasing Georgia - exquisitly beautiful and very healthy with an overwhelming display of flowers in the spring and early summer. Repeat in its first year is not so good, but will improve very noticeably every year. Lovely sweet tea scent. A superb, classic rose.

Some more Austins I can recommend for performance:

William Shakespeare 2000
Molineux
Golden Celebration
Sharifa Asma
Heritage
Abe Darby
Crocus Rose
Fair Bianca
Prospero
Lady of Megginch
Radio Times
Pat Austin
Claire Austin
Christopher Marlowe
Jubilee Celebration
The Ingenious Mr. Fairchild
Sophy's Rose (not much scent)
The Dark Lady (BS susceptible but superb bloomer)
The Prince (a smallish plant but a good bloomer)
The Herbalist
Portmeirion
A Shropshire Lad
Ann Boleyn (flowers blow fast though)

Jude the Obscure is also a good, reliable bloomer (albeit not a bloom machine) with fantastic scent and good health.

In my experience, Austins tend to perform better when grafted. DA in Tyler TX sells the biggets, best quality plants.

Hope this helps,
Andrea

Andrea, sorry for the "blanket" description of Austins, many of us in the US have a love/hate relationship with them. This has been my experience with them in my climate and has been for many others here on the forum from what I've read. I have had various levels of success with them in other places I've gardened, but again that is when I grew mainly grafted versions and in very different conditions. I don't mean to disrespect the Austin roses, in fact I am quite taken with them in general, I just wish I would have more success with growing them here. I have read they do well in the UK, as should be expected. On a side note, I've never grown a hybrid tea rose so I couldn't compare them with Austins. Actually I am going to try my first one this year, Radiance, thanks to fellow forum members who recommend it as very disease resistant. I will be excited to see how it does for me.

As far as the different varieties I have grown many. I have tried:

Abraham Darby
Ambridge Rose
Belle Story
Chianti
Claire Rose
Cressida
Ellen
English Elegance
Fair Bianca
Gertrude Jekyll
Glamis Castle
Golden Celebration
Graham Thomas
Heritage
Jude the Obscure
LD Braithwaite
Leander
Lucetta
Mary Magdalene
Mary Rose
Mary Webb
Noble Antony
Pat Austin
Perdita
Prospero
St Cecilia
St Swithun
Sharifa Asma
Sir Edward Elgar
Tamora
The Alexandra Rose
The Dark Lady
the Generous Gardener
The Prince
The Squire
Tradescant
William Shakespeare 2000
Winchester Cathedral
Windrush

I have ordered 7 grafted Austins this year from both DA in TX and Pickering. I am still babying Jude the Obscure and Pat Austin own roots but have ordered duplicates that have been grafted as back-up. Several others including Mary Magdalene, Noble Antony, WS 2000, Tamora and Sharifa Asma have perished. Heritage is just hanging on, I may lose it too.

So hope springs eternal, I'm not willing to give up just yet!

Andrea and linrose: Two of you make up practically whole DA catalog. Any opinion about Crown Princess Margareta?

linrose: What is happening to your roses? How are you loosing them? BS? How is your soil? At z6b, we should be OK, right?

senko - I really think that growing Austins own-root was my mistake. I potted most of them up for the first growing season and took extraordinary care of them. They just didn't thrive for me. After going through their first season without significant growth, they just couldn't seem to weather the winter well. I believe they just could not develop a strong enough root system in time.

The zone or soil is not the problem at all. In fact one of the nicest beds of Austins I had was in Vermont! Yes I had to winter protect and yes I did have significant dieback but they always bounced back very well and I had a lovely summer show. Perhaps the best garden of Austins I had was in Indiana (save for the horrendous onslaught of JBs we had there) because they seemed to love the climate. There was just enough cold in the winter and just enough heat in the summer, a perfect balance it seemed for them.

So I am not losing any mature Austins here, just the babies I bought own-root. The Generous Gardener is the only own-root Austin I have had success with here and I attribute that to its natural vigor. I have to say I will only buy grafted Austins in the future, and with considerable consideration for disease resistance. One of the other reasons I think The Generous Gardener does well is that it is very resistant to BS. That and its vigor has allowed it to become established in my garden.

Wow. I really like those pictures. I wish my Austins looked even half that good. My luck with the Austins is rather mixed. Again, it depends on your climate and microclimate, your cultural practices, the variety, the rootstock, and, as I am finding out, the age of the plant. I am finding that own-root plants take quite a bit longer than grafted to get going. I have a Happy Child as an own root plant that will be its 3d year this year, and it has yet to get over 6 inches tall. Yet, it blooms with its small, but unmistakable yellow flowers. I ordered a grafted plant to compare it against this year. My Eglantyne just last year began to exhibit some growth determination after about 4 years of not doing much. I hope Claire Rose will do better this year. The rest of my Austins I believe are grafted. I am still trying to recover from that horrible Easter 2007 freeze that crippled everything. My HT Royal Philharmonic bloomed last year with a flower for the first time in the 2 year period, but it was not up to normal. I hope it comes along okay or I may have to replace it.

As to Tea Clipper and Lady Emma Hamilton, my Tea Clipper began to have a nice color and some fragrance as it got going, but the flowers bleach out badly. Lady Emma Hamilton has a delightful color and fragrance. I hope it will do quite well. I am quite smitten with that rose. It holds okay in summer while my Pat Austin fries.

Thanks, Bustopher. I hope Linrose is not mad at me for posting these pics. I didn't mean to hijack her thread, I just wanted to show that Austins can be grown quite well in the US with standard care.

From all I hear here, it really sounds like Austins should be grafted to unfold their potential. All I did with mine (all of the ones in the front yard were from DA in Tyler TX and grafted on Dr Huey) was amending the soil of the planting holes, regular fertilizing with synthetics and organics, and of course deadheading/pruning and, well, spraying. Next thing I knew, they took off like Schmidt's cat, as we say in German.

As you can perhaps tell from the pics of the front of our house, I seriously underestimated how big they would grow in just three or four years, which probably has to do with the long growing season in NC. Coming from northern Germany and having been new to Austins, I expected nice little 3-4ft bushes, you know, just a few splashes of color in the lawn of our front yard, but not this evergrowing sea of flowers (and thorns, haha) that consumed the grass entirely.

I'm doing things a little different here in England, and while my Austins are thriving too in this climate, they're not as huge as the ones I had in NC. It looks like they're grafted on multiflora, like Pickering's. But I've only started growing them again last year, so we'll see.

Hopefully that little Happy Child of yours will grow up soon!

Senko, Crown Princess Margareta is an incredibly beautiful rose, with perfect flowers one might say. Mine in the US were ownroot from J&P, very good quality and good size (not bands), but they still took much longer to establish than the grafted ones. So rebloom was not great in the first year, 2 flushes and some scattered flowers I think. But it improved in their second and third year to 3-4 flushes, but still not overwhelming in flower production. Disease resistance was medium, neither stellar nor bad. The plant that sat in a sunnier, drier location was healthier, and also more floriferous. I really think it's wortyh getting this one, it's just such a beautiful rose with a marvelous color and a very nice sweet tea scent.

Andrea

I had Evelyn at my old house and I can't wait to get her again. I ordered a Tea Clipper tonight from Heirloom.