*** The ones that you want to remove and then decide to keep again.

Juliet, when I read that, I knew which one you were referring to - Madame Antoine Mari. I want to love this rose. I want this rose to live happily ever after in my garden. Her porcelain flowers are exquisite. BUT even with lots of water she still isn't a leafy bush, and her lovely blooms have only disdain for the gardener as she impudently bares her backside - always. It's a lovely backside, but really, they're not what she's famous for, and they don't seem to last long and aren't often enough. It's interesting that La Sylphide does the same thing, but she doesn't offend me. I think it's the foliage problem. If MAM were bushy, I'd probably love her and be happy to have to tip her right side up all the time. As it is, I've decided she's outta here - unless I re-decide again to just move her...but I'm getting tired of changing my mind and getting just as tired of giving roses away.

She's the only current rose that I have this love/hate thing with. All the others are gone including DdB.

Sherry

My Yves Piaget mildews and then balls horribly in spring. Janet doesn't mildew but balls in spring too. They bloom fine the rest of the year though, so I keep them.
My Pat Austin, on the other hand, is wonderful, disease free, vigorous, with pretty and fragrant blooms in abundance. Here is a picture from last year, dated August 24th.

Masha

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Mainly the David Austin roses...the ones that I've tried growing are just not drought tolerant and yet I keep buying them... The David Austin roses bleach out in full sun, and in order to prolong those blooms, I have to move them in the shade.

Example: 'Evelyn. This is a first year Evelyn rose and just about to have a 2nd flush in the summer.
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Unfortunately, I didn't water her for 2 days and when I got back home after work, all her blooms were destroyed by the heat.
The weather for the past 2 days wasn't that hot. About 27 degrees C.
Evelyn is a lovely rose. I wish it was pink and I'm planning to train her into a climber.
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'Evelyn'. Need I explain?

Madame Gregoire Staechelin - I love this rose - elegant, fabulous fragrance, gorgeous foliage But....she sometimes doesn't bloom every year - like a Cox apple, she has a biennial habit. Worse, my next door neighbour has somehow sequestered all the best bits and now a whopping solanum has blocked any re-entry back to my garden. My neighbour loves it so I have to enjoy it by proxy.

Europeana - I love her blooms, but she's a disease-magnet in my no-spray garden. In Summer/Fall she looks like poo from powdery mildew and then completely defoliates from BS, and I think she gets a couple other ailments too, but in Spring she's so lovely... sigh.

And my Ballerinas are also gorgeous in Spring, and then look like poo the rest of the year. They're annoying if I don't aggressively deadhead but ugly if I don't. I'm still debating about keeping them.

Madame Hardy beautiful when she blooms terrible foliage by mid Summer

Juliet and Sherry,

About those roses you love/hate . . . How long have they been in your gardens? Many roses go thru a lackadaisical infancy and a petulant adolescence before they finally settle in and show the patient gardener what they can do. Unless you've had experience of a BARE MINIMUM of 4 or 5 seasons with roses like 'Duchesse de Brabant' and 'Mme Antoine Mari', I'm contesting your right to bit**. ;)

City of York has lovely big semi-double white flowers, with a nice fragrance, and the leaves are a pretty, shiny dark green, as well as disease resistant - but OH MY GOODNESS, THE THORNS!!!!

THICK, BIG, SHARP, ABUNDANT!!!!

On top of that, this is an enormous rose, with canes that are upright, arching, thick, and LONG (up to 20').

On top of that, it only blooms once each year!

It's definitely a really nice rose for the right location, but there is no such location on the condo property where I live.

:(

The red rugosa rose "Robusta". I was delighted to find it (at the Antique Rose Emp. in TX but I ordered it from a NY nursery because it had to survive MA/RI winters) with its true lipstick red blooms, a good addition to my rugosa bed with its whites and pinks. But it has the most killer thorns I've ever seen on anything outside of a sci-fi movie. So I perform GP on it: Gingerly Pruning.

Carol

@sherryocala: Sherry, I do hope your Madame Antoine Mari works out. It is such a gorgeous thing. I also hope you can find a DA rose that will work for you.

@mashamcl: Masha, I'm glad your Pat does well for you, even in summer. Mine is pretty, except for in summer. Maybe I need to water it more. Thanks for that photo. It is lovely.

By what I've read about Evelyn, it seems like I will have one more to love/hate. I have a band of it and this will be her second year. Hoping it does well for me.

@campanula: Madame Gregoire Staechelin is one that I've always wanted. Hmmmmmmm, not sure if it's going to take a year off every now and then. A once bloomer should bloom at least once a year in my book.

@windeaux: Well to answer your question, most of the ones I mentioned I've had for three years, but I've had the Duchesse for two years. I am going to give her more time to present me with fuller blooms. She throws one out every now and then. Perhaps I'm not the most patient gardener. :)

Juliet

Le Jardin - don't be put off - my rose is not in the best situation. The same neighbour now enjoying mine used to ask if I was feeding it babies because when it does bloom it is stupendous - especially viewed from below as she is a head drooper- And the scent is lovely and you do get huge rugosa like heps. Apart from a tiny bit of rust, she has always been healthy, even when other roses in the vicinity are dropping with BS.

Graham Thomas. Every year, I say that I will take it out after it blooms. I now train it around a tall tripod, a difficult task, to keep it from sprawling all over the garden. Its canes are stiff and breakable; the prickles are big and sharp - the rebloom is not good - but in the spring, its beauty breaks my heart, and I never get around to digging it out. I've had it for twenty years, by the way.

Homere. It's such a nicely shaped bush, and blooms generously, but the flowers are so wadded up. I took out a lemon tree that was competing with it, and so will let it have one more spring to show what it can do. This is its fifth year.

Rose de Rescht. Mine is virus'd and never puts out flowers as big as I've seen other places, but oh, the fragrance. I've had it a dozen years, and this is the first year that I've really thought hard about taking it out.

Clotilde Soupert. Need I say more? Talk about wadded up blooms. Last year, however, at least half opened up, the frgrance is lovely, and it's another beautifully shaped plant. I have it pruned just so right now - take it out? Maybe later....

Anita

The only roses that I have had this relationship with were several that simply couldn't handle my location, so when I gave away half my roses (I only had about 8) it was partly because I couldn't keep up with the work, but mostly because I felt that it was as if I were torturing them - two dark red ones that were broiled by my hot west-facing exposure, two that I felt needed to be in the ground and in a better place, and one that I just didn't feel I could handle. I dithered for a long time about giving them away (loved those dark red blooms), but in the end I did it. Not their fault.

Laura

*** lackadaisical infancy and a petulant adolescence

windeaux, you definitely have a point, but I'm not sure that was the way to endear these young ones to me. DdB was almost 3 yrs old & MAM is going on two, but DdB was a thrips magnet until late June which is a long time since blooming here starts early in April. She has a wonderful home now, and Le Vesuve is in her place. One happy ending. You may be guilting me into keeping MAM but in a different spot. Another Le Vesuve is waiting for her present place. Since I really do hate to see their uprooted bodies laying on the trash pile, this will be a happier ending than calling in Madame Shovel. I'll be even happier if she gets tall and slim so I can look up into her flowers. Am I dreaming?

"right to bit**" I'm curious. Dare I ask???

Sherry

Definitely Gertrude Jekyll - lovely, intensely fragrant flowers, but the plant can be quite bipolar. Sometimes it's disease free and a rampant grower. Then it suddenly is covered in blackspot and denudes itself of leaves. One other thing - it has the worst thorns of any rose I've ever encountered. That first flush of blooms on a clean plant make you forget all the issues though.

Here is a link that might be useful: Gertrude Jekyll blooms in my yard

Carefree Sunshine--an absolute bloom machine by my goodness the THORNS!!! They go through every type of glove I have and without body armor the gloves are really just a formality. HowEveR: This rose blooms like MAD all summer....really pumps them out in the heat and doesn't fade. A real workhorse in my no-spray garden.

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As far as your Duchesse de Brabant: Be Patient!!! This rose should blow you mind in year 4. Mine is beside a driveway and gets no supplimental water from me. She blooms alllll summer and almost never is without massive flushes of blooms. I never trim or prune this rose and it is 5 x 5 and healthy without spray. Petal count, weak necks and flushes all increase with time. She is worth the wait.
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Ronda

Ronda,

I never thought this could happen, but I think you've just enabled me to give DdB a try! The last pic did it for me! The thing now is finding a place for her. I have my spring shipment coming in two weeks!

Here are a few of my love-hate relationships with roses:

BELINDA'S DREAM - a superb rose in almost every way. I just wish the fragrance was stronger.

CLOTILDE SOUPERT - I can deal with the balling, but last year the powdery mildew was relentless. The climber is much better than the shrub in resisting the disease. Either way I can't imagine what this rose must be like in places like California where pm is endemic.

EVELYN - sigh ... the most beautiful rose in the world, and the most aggravating.

PAT AUSTIN - the gorgeous blossoms have the no vase life to speak of, and they nod downward so I can't see them. Would be spectacular as a climbing rose, but she stopped throwing long canes during her third year.

THE PILGRIM - poor repeat, but oh-my-god the blooms are breathtakingly beautiful with a fragrance to match. The color is my favorite shade of yellow: a pure canary yellow in the middle of the flower fading out to translucent white. Excellent vase life too. More please, I want M-O-R-E!!!

Difficult to say all the roses I love. There are too many... My favourite is Celsiana.
There are roses I wouldn't plant in my garden for a question of colour but I can appreciate them in other gardens. Especially spotted or bi-color roses like Joseph's coat or honorine de Brabant

Here is a link that might be useful: A Little Bit of Paradise

Marianne (a newer rose, but classed as a gallica and a gallica/austin cross, so I'll mention it.) Some of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen on a rose. BUT in my garden, the bush has been pretty wretched. Long octopus arms, and has been subject to dieback in the spring. Pretty scraggledy when it's not blooming. But when it blooms--SUCH a beauty. I've been thinking about digging it up just because as a once-bloomer it's looking so horrible for so much of the year. The answer might be to hide it back by the fence and train it as a climber. I don't know if I can abandon these blooms quite yet:


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haha Interesting post
Mine answer is "Halloween rose" :)

For me it was two roses, Therese Bugnet and Mrs. Doreen Pike, both rugosa hybrids. I loved the blooms and the fragrance but neither was well-suited to my hot garden and I didn't like the bare canes which lasted much longer than my other roses. They went to rose heaven but I especially loved the blooms of Mrs. Doreen Pike and miss them, but they were all too fleeting and fried as soon as it became really warm. They've been replaced with the Bourbon Appoline and Duchesse de Brabant which will hopefully love it here.

Ingrid

Sylvia, that was so funny. Having had Mermaid, I would never, ever have another one. Some experiences you just don't want to repeat.

Ingrid

I think I saw Mermaid on a trip to Venice (Italy) it was actually grown over doorway arches, but the arch was so high that the thorns would have been at least 15 feet up in the air. I guess the tree-like trunks don't have thorns. It was fantastic looking and smelling with those puffy golden stamens and lemony blossoms -- like airy clouds of sunlight. It thrills me even to remember it. I also saw it growing along very high windows. Grown similarly was Confederate jasmine (or what we call confederate jasmine -- trachelosperum). Amazing what huge vines can grow out of seemingly small containers and so fragrant they perfume whole neighborhoods. It's rather moist in Venice.

I was at a rose meeting last weekend. We had the owners of Northland Rosarium there..from Spokane? Anyway, they had gone to England and saw the David Austin nursery and fields. She mentioned that Austin bred his roses to nod..the theory is that he wanted them to be looking you right in the eye..well it was pretty funny when one person said "Gee, David Austin must be short". I guess David thought his roses would be taller than most folks and when they nod they would be very visable.

@Ronda in Carolina: Thanks for that photo of the Duchesse! It shows me what mine will be in time and I will be patient for that kind of beauty. Hope is spring eternal, isn't it?

Juliet

Ronda, I'm also very grateful for the encouragement re Duchesse de Brabant. Your specimen is gorgeous and I'm very happy to think that mine has the possibility of some day looking equally wonderful.

Ingrid

Lovely description, Monarda: thanks!!