What sort of weather have you been having?

Has it been your "normal" weather pattern?
Unusually hot? Unusually cold? Unusually wet or dry?

Our weather has been sort of whacky in every way, and the roses have seemed quite confused.

My Teas have been blooming nicely. ONE of my Bishop Darlingtons is blooming. Another, maybe 30 ft. away FINALLY has buds, but as yet they are small, and none looks ready to open.
I believe some of our roses will finish their first flush before others even think about blooming.

Jeri

No real strange weather - not too wet and not dry, just a long early spring. The tiny leaves are not normal. If no one has an idea as to the cause I guess I will dig them up and dispose of them so as not to chance the spread of something to my healthy roses. Denise

WOW - that is an amazingly radical plan - can you not wait a few weeks - with so many affected, it does seem most likely to be weather related to me - or perhaps some sort of herbicide damage? Are they near each other? Is it possible that one of your neighbors used some sort of herbicide and it drifted into your garden (this happened to me). Before I would just jump to the conclusion that they all got some mysterious disease simultaneously, I would water them well (no fertilizer), and WAIT A WHILE before just ripping them all out. They may start putting out healthy new growth in a few weeks.

Jackie

Not all RRD roses will have that red coloration. I lost several that seemed stunted or something which I pretended was due to the drought and by the next season, they showed the red coloration but originally it was just funny looking bloom not unlike the green rose and then nothing and another season and the redness and the crazy blooms. By then I had 20-30 roses infected.

patricia43, I suggest that, if it reappears, that you send a sample to one of the Universities doing rose virus research.

The nearest to you is probably Professor I. E. Tzanetakis, Department of Plant Pathology, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville 72701.

http://plantpathology.uark.edu/2277.htm

Another is Professor B.E.L. Lockhart, Department of Plant Pathology, University of Minnesota

http://plpa.cfans.umn.edu/People/Faculty/BenhamELLockhart/

I think Jacqueline is right--ripping them out now does seem rather drastic. Could it be that they need some sort of nutrient? Have you fertilized this spring? Have you asked a local nursery or a master gardener in your area about the problem? Also, give this forum a little more time to discuss before you do anything you can't reverse. I'd wait and observe a little while before I ripped them out. Good luck.

Annabeth

Henry, I had two guys from Auburn eye ball them in situ.

Could just be weather related. I have plants (Excellence von Schubert, Marchesa Boccella) where the first few blooms are always stunted or vegetative. I just snap them off and wait for warmer weather. This year has been crazy, some days very warm, some cooler, so the plants are confused. I don't hear anything significantly wrong with your plants. Patience, please. Let them settle into the season, then reassess.

Look I have been gardening all my life and I think I can tell normal delayed blooming roses and something else. These roses look SICK and I am afraid it is RRD. No herbicide damage - so nutrient deprivation. What about spring sickness? Could it be that? I have not been able to find on the web what to do about it if it is spring sickness. Do roses recover from that? (None of these are new roses, all well-established and never acted like this before.

Don't ask for peoples advice then get stroppy when they dare to disagree with you.

Hem, since you know those plants so well and can not share photos, do you have an ag commission, master gardener program, university botany program or botanical garden you can take a sealed in a bag sample?

It seems like you already know what your plan is and are looking for approval of the plan. And that is harder with little to go on from the experts here in the form of photos (surely not me)

I am not familar with a rose disease called "spring sickness". (There is such a disease in lilies.)

Do you mean "rose spring dwarf"?

There is also a virus like disease called "rose leaf curl".
http://www.ehow.co.uk/facts_7629171_roses-curling-leaves.html

Here is a link that might be useful: rose spring dwarf

What about little critters eating the roots? I would dig down carefully, feel under the plant and see if you have root damage. Until my cats got the chipmunk and vole population under control, I had several damaged roses that meet your description.

I've seen something like that with roses trying to grow and bloom right through the light freezes of spring. They always look bad for a while but then get over it.
How do they look now?

I have a few looking less than great...while others are doing well.

I did a light trim (shaping) to take a bit of stress of the plant, then dumped some compost on top, watered well, mulched a bit and am in a sit and wait routine on them. THis is usually my plan of action, and without obvious reason for a more drastic approach, my advise. and, it usually seems to perk them right up.

Good luck! I, too, am cultivating patience...as I had a bit of spider mite panic a few months ago, and now all is well!

Well, I'm back again and the roses are no better. Sorry for being impatient and stroppy - I didn't think I was coming off that way. 14 of 96 roses have not leafed out or have partially leafed out with bright greenish yellow deformed leaves. No voles, no freezes, no lack of nutrients or water after what was a very mild winter. In my 40 years of gardening I have not had this happen before. At this point I am just reporting - not asking for advise.

Hemlady, I had something similar happen to me, though with only 1 rose out of 12 - all budded bare roots I planted this past winter. All of them leafed out nicely and put out healthy stems, except for Golden Celebration, which put out tiny (half a centimetre - perhaps even less) yellowish-greenish sickly leaves.

I potted him and and put the pot in another place in the garden, so as to plant another rose in that (really) prime spot. The number of direct sunlight hours was approximately the same. After 4-3 weeks he started recovering & putting out healthy green full size leaves.

Since the pot kept getting in the way I eventually dumped it in a northern facing corner with 2 hours of direct sunlight only. (Truth is all my roses went through a musical chairs game because I'm a newbie and it took my awhile to identify some of the mistakes I made).

Limbo seems to agree with GC, who is now into blooming (the first bloom was quite small but the second much larger) It was whenm I saw his blooms in real life that I realized I don't really like this rose.

I haven't got a clue why he was stunted in what seemed to be a good spot and then why he's prospering in what seems to be a bad spot. Perhaps the recovery has nothing at all to do with the change in place and it's just a coincidence. Whatever the reason, had I not placed him in limbo till I made up my mind about him I wouldn't have seen his blooms at all & wouldn't have had the opportunity of deciding out ways must part.

Just reporting :)

If it was me in that situation, I would be prepared to make an initial sacrifice and dig one whole plant out so I could have a good root around - as you probably know, there are mechanical reasons (waterlogging, soil compaction, physiological stuff like weather) and there are diseases (nematodes, fusarium or verticillium wilts and so on, but without doing an autopsy on at least one rose, you are still playing guessing games.
If you were terribly worried about spreading infection, you coukld isolate the agffected roses with horticultural fleece - it would probably cost a few dollars but can be washed and recycled - you know the stuff, right? white. lightweight cottony material.
Anyway, I think most people here are horrified for the loss of so many mature roses and we all want to keep hope alive....but whatever you do, after 40 years, you must have seen it all and will bounce back as usual.

"14 of 96 roses have not leafed out or have partially leafed out with bright greenish yellow deformed leaves." Yes, I've had that happen occasionally. I have a 'Ruby Lips' (sorry--not an Antique Rose) doing it right now...but, as with all of the others in the past, it seems to be starting on the road to normalcy now. The recovery seems to start at the base of the plant, and slowly work its way upward, as if the plant were finding it difficult to get up a good head of steam, so to speak. It seems to happen with either plants which are in their first season after transplanting, or with ones which were fertilized too early in the season (before they've shaken off dormancy). My experience is that they always get back to normal "in due course" if they're kept from unusual stresses.

Thanks for the information - especially you who have seen this before. I will give them some more time and report back later.

Hemlady, If your experience with the winter of 2011-12 was similar to the atypical winter experienced by most of the rest of us in NC, then relax and allow your roses to adjust. Fearful of another Easter freeze like the one we experienced a few short years ago, I delayed my pruning/de-leafing this year until early April. It's been only during the past 7-10 days that many of my roses have begun to show signs of vigor. Whatever spring flush I have this year will be the latest in the 15 yrs I've gardened here. And given the escalating heat, it will probably be the least impressive . . . Climate change? Who knows?

Hemlady back again to let you know what happened to my roses. I dug up and disposed of several of the least favorites. No vole damage to be seen. The others look EXACTLY like they did back in May. The are just sticks with tiny little nubs of leaves. They are not dead, but they have not grown in any way for weeks. The other roses in my garden look great and have bloomed and bloomed. Still no idea what this is, just reporting. I have ordered replacements and will dig out the bad ones this fall if they have not done anything by then. Denise

Tell you the truth, if they were my roses, I'd be curious as all getout.

I think I'd take Campanula's suggestion, and dig up ONE of the plants, and see what's going on down there under ground.

If you were in California, I'd say you might have gophers moving in -- but you're not, so it's likely not an influx of Western Pocket Gophers ... But I'd want to know.

In fact, I DO rather want to know.
So if you do dig one up, I think we'd all like to hear what you see.

Jeri

I wonder if this is herbicide damage. Roses that get hit with Roundup in late fall to early spring can absorb it through green bark and then pop out with symptomatic leaves in spring. These are typically light green, thin, and straplike, with overgrown stipules (flanges at the base of the leaf stalk). Curly. Certainly RRD would not appear all at once all over several plants.

I have dug up many of them and there was no vole damage. I don't usually use any herbicide around my roses, but I suppose there could have been drift - but the damage is really random. One is fine and one right beside it is sick. Strange.

Denise,
Strange. If you know someone that can take photos with their phone to show us, I'm sure you can get a much better idea of what is going on. I hope you figure out what is going on.

Does the soil around the sick roses feel or smell or taste different than the soil around the other roses? Gean

Hemlady, I was hoping you would say whether the particular deformity of your leaves matches the description I gave of Roundup damage, particularly the overdeveloped stipules.