Marcia,

Louis Phillipe meets all you criteria.

Thank you. I'll look him up.
Marcia

Thanks, Sherry. Lots to read about. I hadn't thought about the watering problem. We might spend a month here in the summer. Any roses I grow will be planted in the ground. We don't have sprinklers or a watering system. Are any of those roses more drought tolerant than others? Can they survive the summer with normal rainfall if they are heavily mulched? (I realize there is the possibility of droughts.)
Marcia

Well maybe if they were established roses a few years old. I don't know about 6 month old babies. Once a week rains could be survivable but you never know about rain. Add lots of organics to the sand when you plant - and mulch them good. I don't know...

Sherry

I guess I'll take my chances and try a couple but I won't go hogwild with buying rose plants right away. I started small with roses in my PA garden but before long I had dozens of them. They are addictive!
Thanks for your responses, Sherry.
Marcia

Hi Marcia

I'm south of Sarasota too :-) and my roses have been living on rainfall only since September or so. (After we had the irrigation water tested and it was so saline it was killing plants. So we turned it off.)

Winter is the dry season here (haha, lately not) so summer with it's scorching heat will be the test for my roses. They did well in September when the heat was still pretty brutal and no rain.

I mulch with cardboard or several layers of newspaper and put shredded bark mulch on top to look pretty. Works great to keep roots cool and slow evaporation.

You should consider some of the Bourbon family like Souvenir de la Malmaison, and her cousins. I have found them to love our climate and they are fragrant beautiful OGR's.

This is Deuil de Dr. Reynaud, a climber. He's grown 5' since planting in early summer 2009 and is green and healthy through all this cold weather. Well actually all the roses are green and healthy right now.
{{gwi:230982}}

Good luck with your garden.

Denise

Thanks for the encouragement, Denise. Do the Bourbons have a blackspot problem here? That is a beautiful rose! I'll have to look for him and SDLM. My list is getting long already.
Marcia

I'd recommend Maggie -- strong raspberry-and-roses scent and moderate blackspot resistance, as well as the single musk rose (I know you don't want singles, but it's the ultimate in fragrance and does well in a Florida, non-sprayed garden, with only minor blackspot). You could grow the double musks, but they are not as pretty (IMHO), and they don't smell as good (by anyone's measure).

I have Louis Phillipe down here and I do not detect any fragrance. Cramoisi Superieur is fragrant to my nose. Tipsy Imperial Concubine, Duchesse du Brabant and Clementina Carbonieri are nice too. I'm considering adding Francis Dubreuil too. I had one up north and it was wonderfully fragrant but I'm not sure if his flowers will fry down here or not. I may try to find a partially shaded spot for him...

SDLM gets blackspot in central Florida, but comes back strong.