Wait...it's been a long time since I went to Sunday school, but did Jacob have a coat of many colors too? They must've been all the rage back in Biblical times! Actually, who the heck IS Jacob anyway? Wasn't he the one with the whale? It sounds like a case of the grower taking naming liberties with the Bible. Frankly I think if they rename it anything it should be something like "Concertina Wire." I have to put on a Kevlar body suit to get within 5 feet of mine!

Hi Cindy In zone 4, you do want to protect the rose but some of the strategies you mention may do more harm than good. In no zone should you put plastic around a rose (at least not on the first layer), as it would trap moisture and cause a lot of mildew and other damage to the rose beyond the cold. The idea is that whatever you put around the rose has to have good air circulation, so the styrofoam rose cones are also not recommended. If you want to wrap it, I'd recommend something like burlap that can breathe. I've seen some experienced rose people put bubble wrap around the edge of their rose beds but not around each individual rose. As a new rose grower, I wouldn't recommend that. You also should leave whatever canes you have on the rose and not cut them down in fall, even though you'll see some rose guides say you're supposed to do that. The reason you don't is that the winter is going to kill off a lot of the growing parts on the end of the canes no matter what you do, so if you have longer canes there's a better chance of some of the rose cane surviving. If you wrap the rose, you can take down the supports and lay the canes down on the ground to make it less affected by the wind. As climbers get bigger over the years I don't bother with that, but you could try it. I use the leaf bags you mention, but I don't put them on top of the rose but stand them around the edges of the rose, like creating a mini down coat. The idea is to protect the canes from the worst of the winter winds and provide some insulation so it doesn't have wild temperature swings from cold to warm till it's ready to wake up in the spring. You can fill the inside of the leaf bag circle around the roses with something natural that stays dry over the winter, like OAK leaves (other leaves get mushy and won't work) or pine needles. You probably have what is called a grafted rose, which means that Joseph's Coat is attached to the roots of another rose that you don't want to grow. There is a knobby bit at the bottom of the rose where all the canes grow from that is the graft, and that's the most important thing to protect over the winter. The rest of the canes can die and the rose you want will regrow if the graft is still alive in spring. If the rose mysteriously turns into a red rose, then it's the rootstock that is growing, and the Joseph's Coat rose would then have died. After all that, Joseph's Coat isn't really all that hardy even in my zone, and it has died several times even in zone 5 with a lot of protection, so don't consider it a failure if it dies. Go ahead and stand some leaf bags around it and wrap it in burlap maybe, and see how it goes. Do this AFTER the ground freezes (around here no earlier than Thanksgiving) or the mice may move in and chew on your rose all winter. You want the rose to get good and cold so it goes to sleep first. Snow is excellent protection for roses so a good layer of snow cover is the best strategy to protect a rose if you can get it. If this rose doesn't survive well for you, log back on here for a question about climbing roses that will do better for you in zone 4. Cynthia

Congratulations on overwintering a Joseph's Coat in zone 4. I have been unsuccessful with that one in zone 5 even with protection. I'm not sure if the green wilted leaves mean necessarily it has survived, since what you want is green cane - the leaves are toast after the winter regardless. Still it's a good sign so far. I'd leave the covering on a bit more if you're still getting temperatures down to 10. I tend to uncover things when the temperatures stop dipping much below 20, since those temperatures don't tend to bother roses much. If you're concerned about moisture you could uncover the upper portions as you describe and protect the lower portions. You might get extra damage to those upper portions in temperatures of 10, but what's important is to protect the base. Cynthia

When you say you thought "it was a goner", do you mean the plant appeared dead, or what? Are the white flowers similar to what Joseph's Coat should look like, only in white? Or, are they smaller and single? If the plant appeared dead and now there is something growing and flowering there, perhaps it may have been budded on R. multiflora and the stock is now suckering. Or, if you have multiflora growing in the area, perhaps birds (or other critters) dropped seeds which have germinated near where the Joseph's Coat grew and are now flowering. R. multiflora looks like this. If you mean the Joseph's Coat just looked terrible but wasn't dead and it's now flowering as expected, only instead of the proper coloring, the flowers are washed out toward white, you may have had some freeze damage or the weather has influenced the flower pigmentation, which will probably be more normal once the heat arrives and the plant starts growing and flowering normally. Photos of what you're seeing would probably help diagnose the issue.