Another quote from Dr. Amrine in the Q and A link that I gave. "Q: If a rose is symptomatic for RRD, you mentioned pruning out this symptomatic portion of the rose can control the disease. How far below symptomatic growth should the pruning cuts be made? I would remove the symptomatic cane all the way to the crown. But if you only have one cane and it is a graft, I would prune down to one or two leaves above the graft and hope for the best. Rosarians or horticulturists can probably give a better answer." ------------------------------------------ But then in another place he states the following: "Q: Once discovered in a rose garden, what is the recommended treatment/response to hinder the virus from spreading to healthy roses? Remove all symptomatic plants. Valuable plants should be isolated and an attempt made to recover grafts or rooted cuttings from them. If you live in an area with lots of nearby symptomatic multiflora roses, treat with a miticide on a weekly basis from April until late fall, when all growth ceases and leaves fall off." H. Kuska comment: So we appear to have 2 different suggestions in the same Q and A. ????? Here is a link that might be useful: Q and A link given earlier

And the article is from someone in Yorktown VA. Less than accurate is this: Rose rosette disease, first documented in 1941, is traced to the multiflora rose, which came from Japan in 1866 as a common rootstock for ornamental roses. Unfortunately, it was found that multiflora roses are bad because a single plant can produce a million or more viable seeds; over time, the roses have become invasive weeds with enormous disease problems. Multiflora was first introduced as a garden plant. NOT as a rootstock. Multiflora spread not from rootstock but from the USDA's encouragement of its use as a substitute for barbed wire, as a stabilizer for stream banks, to prevent erosion from strip mining, etc. And the disease problem is a single disease.

Roundup can pass through a connected system. But despite Henry's repeated quotes of various scientific articles (usually related to edible annual herbaceous plants unrelated to roses or seedling growth in farmland) there is no real evidence that any transfer from roots to soil to roots in the sort of application we're talking about, can really harm an adjacent hardwood bush like a rose, not to mention a huge established shrub like the one we are discussing. People have been 'surgically' removing garden plants using roundup for ever. Most of it is bound rapidly to the soil (to the extent that cutting a stub and powdering with a little dirt before 'rounduping' greatly diminishes the efficacy of the herbicide) and what little may or may not end up in the rizosphere from where some may or may not be absorbed by adjacent roots has not shown any harmful effects under field conditions. Now we have discussed this repeatedly before and I'm sure Henry will come up with yet a few obliquely related articles stating that traces of roundup or the results of its decomposition in the soil have mean identified in adjacent plants (and I have no reason not to believe this) but the field experience of millions of gardeners and farmers shows you can roundup a bush with the cut and apply method with no noticeable harmful effects to the adjacent ones. If there was a problem we would know about it through collective knowledge and word of mouth even if we didn't undestand the mechanics of it. I don't challenge what the linked articles are describing, I'm challenging Henry's crude interpetation and his arbitrary chain linking of them, which is grossly exaggerating to say the least. I'm sure Henry understands very well what he's reading but when someone is on a mission anything goes. There, I have vented off. PS I have never ever sprayed roundup or any other herbicide in my garden for weed control and I don't intend to, but I have used roundup on cut stems and stubs of small bushes and large trees repeatedly when it was the only viable solution to get rid of the plant for whatever reason. PS2 In the above I don't mean to recommend the roundup method for the particular RRV suspicion problem at hand. Firstly I have no knowledge or experience of RR disease and secondly I wouldn't do it myself out of fear of passing the herbicide through a possibly connected root system which, even if it doesn't kill the mother plant, it may cause symptoms similar to RRD which, for obvious reasons, would defeat the purpose of the original effort to save the mother plant..... I just commented on the use of roundup to kill individual plants.

The virus, unless it was in the graft, comes onto the foliage through mites. It works its way down the cane to the bud union, or roots in that case. No I just got rid of the whole thing, and am still looking for the smaller roots. I really dont think the hairy roots are that much to worry about, but its hard to get all the roots. In my case it was not in the grafted canes yet. If it is an old rose, you might want to replace soil anyway. The concern about roots might be that multiflora can grow from a small root, and many grafted roses in the NE and Canada are on multiflora. Every body is trying to go own root as much as possible because of the infection in MF.