What does the foliage look like? What sort of "white fungus"??? Powdery mildew??? How old were the plants? What roses were they? Where are you located? Jeri Coastal Ventura Co., SoCal

I read this in my Rose Society's Newsletter: This spring I had to prune many of my older hybrid teas to the ground. Some of the young roses on ‘Fortuniana’ I left longer and just removed the really bad-looking canes. My logic for this is that ‘Fortuniana’-rootstock roses grow best when left tall and it might be too much of a shock to remove all of the old canes. Right now they are all putting out new growth, much of which is probably “fool’s gold”. Canes that are damaged and not outright killed by winter will always put out new growth. The problem is that this growth will likely be weak with lots of blind shoots and poor blooms if they bloom at all. But on these younger roses, I am hoping that the leaves will at least make enough food to give the bud union some extra “oomph” to pump out a few basal breaks before May. If they do, then I will prune out the weak, damaged canes so that all of the rose’s energy goes into the new strong canes. course this assumes that the bud union is healthy enough to do just that....no sure thing at all after the winter of 2013-14. How can you tell if the cane is just damaged and not killed? After the dramatic plunge from temperatures in the mid-70s in late December to near zero in early January, canes that were killed turned black, meaning that all the cell walls burst inside the cane and in the cambium layer. Some “good as dead canes” also will look shriveled and desiccated. Damaged canes will have mushy brown pith or dried-out, shrunken pith with gaps in the center of the cane. Canes that have only slightly brown centers can go either way and might be worth keeping. The most deceptive canes to diagnose are ones that are bright green, bright red, or a combination of healthy-looking green and red. These canes are often very large and beautiful looking. They formed late in the year when weather conditions were ideal for rapid growth. Sadly though, the reason they look so young and healthy is they did not have enough time to harden off before the severe freezes that occurred. Blame the warm December for that. These canes have “zero” chance of surviving and must be cut off at the bud union. When you cut into one, the center will have nothing but brown “gunk”. There is nothing there worth saving. This is the reason we do not fertilize after early September. We do not want to encourage these “monster basal breaks” to start growing. Growing conditions are perfect enough in late September and October without any extra help from over- enthusiastic rosarians. I am even considering changing my own practice on this matter to not fertilizing with a high nitrogen fertilizer after the third week of August. We always thought that the excess nitrogen from an early September fertilizing would be long gone by the time October rolled around. Maybe it really isn’t! I used to start planting roses for clients in late March. But with freezes in March and early April, I have pushed back my planting date to around April 10. On that day, I can look at the forecast for the next week to see if a severe freeze is likely. If not, I start planting. Of course if we see a severe freeze on May 1, that might be the signal to stop growing roses altogether. Let’s hope we don’t ever find out. Okay, so now it is early May and we have a good idea which roses are going to recover and which ones are goners. What about ones that you are not really sure about? Do you dig them up or give them more time. Here are my rules of thumb for that... If it is a rose I was already considering getting rid of, then bring out Mr. Shovel. If there are no new basal breaks and the rest of bush does not look good, feed Mr. Shovel. If the rose did not do well last year, let Mr. Shovel feast. If there is at least one decent new basal break or low lateral cane and I like the rose, I give it more time. If the rose is one that is hard to find and I like it, I will give it a bit more time even if it has not put out any strong new growth yet. If the rose is a large mature rose which has done very well in the past and it is a favorite of mine, I will keep it and give it the entire summer even if canes continue to die back in June. Why keep this one? A few years ago there was a big Thanksgiving freeze. I protected my roses well and thought they all survived the winter in good shape. Come the following spring, big canes on my best bushes started dying back. This continued into July, so I shovel-pruned and planted new bushes there the following year. That fall there were two roses, ‘Pat’s Choice’ and ‘Affirm’, that I never got around to digging up because they had large bud unions on ‘Fortuniana’. They still looked terrible and I did not want to go to the trouble of winter mulching bushes that I was going to dig up anyway. So I just decided to let winter finish them off and I would replace them next year when I had more energy for such things. To my surprise, these two roses that I had left for dead put out dozens of strong basal breaks. By summer, these bushes had recovered every bit to their former size and continued to be two of the biggest bushes in my garden. Now they have suffered heavy damage again and I have cut them back again. I am anxious to see how they recover this time. If you have decided to let a badly damaged bush recover, here is what you do. First, keep it well-watered. Water every day if possible in hot weather. Fertilize with your favorite liquid fertilizer like Mills Easy Feed, Peter’s 20-20-20, MiracleGro, etc., according to directions. Pinch off all flower buds as soon as they appear. Do not let them bloom at all! This will divert all the energy into making new canes, not mediocre blooms. It is imperative that you spray religiously. You need every last healthy green leaf to make food for the recovering rose bush. Pick off Japanese Beetles as you see them. You will not have many because they are drawn first and foremost to the blooms. And there will be no blooms on these recovering roses...right? Do not spray for beetles...period! Over-spraying for beetles will encourage spider mites and your precious recovering rose does not need to deal with mites. If you do get mites, wash them off the undersides of leaves as soon as you see them. Use a water wand to wash each leaf. Do this for a few days in a row. This will also double as your daily watering for the roses as well. Stop regular fertilizing by late August, although you can use superphosphate, root-stimulator, or even Mills Magic Rose Mix (the dry stuff) as they have very little nitrogen. This you can do into early September. Just remember, use nothing with more than 5% nitrogen. If you are lucky, by September, the bushes will have recovered enough that you can let them bloom and pick some blooms for the house. If not, they may need more time. One final option for your freeze-damaged rose is to dig it up, put it in a five or seven gallon pot, and baby it with lots of water and fertilizer. Bring it into a warm garage or greenhouse in the winter and presto...you will likely have a nice looking rose to plant next spring. I do this all the time with clients’ roses that I remove to make way for the new roses that they want, even if the roses are in ghastly shape that only a mother could love. I pot them up in five-gallon nursery pots, using a nice Fafard potting mix. I put them in a half sun/shade area of my yard so they will not burn up in the hot summer sun and then take care of them for the rest of the year. In late fall, I move them into my greenhouse and by spring, quite often I have nice looking roses that can be planted into someone’s garden. This does entail a bit of extra work though, so be sure you want to go to the effort before you start. The final thing you will need to do is to provide winter protection for the recovering rose. I have started using the Nutra mulch from Green Bros. Earthworks for my winter protection. It is a nice brown fine-textured light and fluffy mix that is easily applied. It also will help feed your roses as it breaks down the following spring and summer. Mound it up high around the canes and pray we do not have a repeat performance of this year’s disastrous winter. My final note on rose damage deals with what to do with tree roses. To my pleasant surprise, the past three winters have not been too hard on my tree roses, even considering how cold my garden is compared to much of metro Atlanta inside the perimeter. My tree roses include ‘Lasting Love’, ‘Julia Child’, ‘Moonstone’, and ‘Sedona’. There was virtually no damage at all on them since 2010. This is surprising since the bud union is three feet above ground and totally exposed. There is really not much I could have done to protect them this year with the exception of draping frost cloth over them and putting a small heater underneath the frost cloth. In northern gardens, rosarians sometimes loosen one side of the roots and lay the entire tree rose on its side and cover it with mulch or soil. I will say this now...that is just too much work and it would not have helped this winter! If you had actually tried this, you would also have had the unpleasant surprise of seeing new shoots growing vertically from the canes that were lying sideways at ground level. This would have been bizarre indeed! Gardens in the north don’t have three weeks of temperatures in the 60s and 70s to deal with, so they do not get shoots growing straight up. But we do! That is all for now. May your roses have survived winter’s ravages and thrive throughout the upcoming summer months. From the April 2014 issue of The Phoenix, newsletter of the Greater Atlanta Rose Society, Bobbie Reed, Editor.

There are a number of possibilities. It is a matter of narrowing down and eliminating as many as possible. It either happened from an above ground problem or a below ground problem. Below ground: What I would do is dig them up and examine the root systems. Dried out? Rotted? Does the soil where it was have a sour stink? Are there massive tree roots in the same area that are competing and robbing the roses of water and nutrients? Root or crown galll? Did the irrigation clog and the roses died for lack of water that went unnoticed? And so on. Above ground: signs of a disease like downy mildew or canker? Did a neighbor spray an herbicide? Photos might help.

lesdvs9, it was just the foliage. Today I noticed that a few green leaves seem to have revived. I'm guessing that the "cultivating" chopped off too many roots. It's not my yard, and when the neighbor asks, I give free advice. I've offered the same free advice (including the tip to water, fertilize, water) more than once over the past few years, but even when I talk directly to the guys who are doing the work, they smile and nod, and then do whatever they've been doing (language barrier), so it's a Sisyphean task. If I'm around when they dig up the rose, I'll check the roots. That is a good way to figure out what happened. The neighbor is eager to replace it.