There are active groups of Old Rose folks in your area, who find roses that are well-adapted to your conditions. It may be that some of those warm-climate roses are better-suited to your conditions than roses bred for English conditions. That's what we found, here in Coastal Southern California. Tea Roses, Chinas, and Noisettes are our best choices. The Polyanthas, I think, probably do well there. Better, perhaps, than the Austins. You'll have to experiment, to see what works best for you. But you might want to look at the offerings of the Antique Rose Emporium, in Brenham, TX. Jeri

Well, considering how much a fan of own-root roses here in my cold zone, this was an eye-opening exercise. I went through my entire alphabetical list of 800 or so roses, a majority of which are flori/HT/grandiflora roses, and noted any that I considered excellent on own roots. It turns out a lot of outstanding bloomers that I vaguely had considered floris or HTs were actually shrubs, and many of my best HTs were in fact grafted. Dang. I have a bad survival rate with bare root roses, but it looks like I should be cautious with the HT own root roses on a second round. My impression was that the floribundas weren't particularly bothered by being own root and very few of mine were grafted, but by far my best bloomers among the HTs tended to be the grafted ones. Who knew?? Here's my list of the definite prolific or otherwise robust roses in these categories: Floribunda: - prolific Bolero Floral Fairy Tale LavaGlut Mandarin Ice Grand Duc Henri Occhi di Fata Pinocchio Suni Louisa Stone/Guinevere Pillow Talk Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Impatient Roman Holiday Alice Pat Champagne Moment Bad Worishofen/Pink Emely Eutin Hot Cocoa HTs Beverly Francis Dubreuil Cubana Comtesse de Segur Dames de Chenonceau Acropolis Aloha Headliner Nigrette (no worse than it would do grafted) Papageno Lafter Maid of Honor Spiced Coffee Golden Buddha Birthday Girl Grandif �" Paloma Blanca Paw Maw Lagerfeld Earth Song (extremely well) Mother of Pearl I ended up needing an honorable mention for the HTs, with roses that are robust and vigorous growers, but not terribly prolific or frequent rebloomers. I figure that can be true of any of the HTs and it wouldn't depend on them grafted or not, so for what it's worth here are the good HTs on own roots, for me: Peggy Rockefeller Karl Herbst Intermezzo (surprisingly hardy for a lavender Dot rose) Neptune Henri Matisse Careless Love Charlotte Brownell Harry G Hastings Madame Delbard Break oâÂÂDay Sophisticate I agree that Double Delight is a very weak grower under any circumstances, but virtually microscopic if own root (and I've tried several times). It refuses to die before lingering several years, but never thrives own root. Cynthia

It looks like dieback from too short roots or any number of bareroot types of problems. I can't soak them that long this time of year, for instance, because it's prime fungal crud season here with annoyingly changing temps at the same time ;) Just prune off all the bad and hope things settle in! You'd better physically check the soil to make sure you do need that much water. I use peat for texture/drainage and to keep my clay-based soil from drying out as quickly as the top layers do naturally in the heat. In my conditions, the moisture gets spread more evenly in the hole (a good thing here) when I use a lot of peat and my natural soil. In the spring, it could definitely get too moist if I watered every day! In the summer that's a different story :) I don't mulch in the spring because my soil (and the peat) stay almost too moist, so I want them to dry out more then. Just never let peat completely dry out or it will stay dry underground even after rain, etc! I avoid it in the top couple of inches of soil because of that, and I do use mulch on top in the summer when things start to have problems going dry here. Wet springs and baking summers may not be everyone's situation, though, of course :) Good luck!

I live in British Columbia and there can be wet, cold weather in spring. My Dark Desire is now 8 years old. It never, ever gets black spot and it is not overly thorny (the worst possible thorns are on Falling in Love.) These aspects are apparently very variable according to location. It would grow too tall and become leggy but I cut it down every sprng. I have to because the cold winter always causes some die off, but each spring it renews itself again. It needs a rejuvenation but I have no idea what more it needs than the fertilizer I provide each year. Too bad they can't talk.