Looks like normal new growth to me.

Are those canes dying from the ground up?

Jeri

Ummm- I'm talking about the dead stuff. I just had to dig out three roses where this stuff took over the whole rose and killed it, just pruned one where this stuff had killed 85% of it, and then I have this Belinda's Dream and a Perle des Jardins that are half eaten by this dieback problem. I'm looking to stop it.

Jeri, thank you for responding. I just noticed this when everything greened up after the winter and it was time to prune. Most of them look like they are dying from the top down, but I had a few where you could see the black all the way down the cane and some seeping into the base of the plant.
Thank you.

It looks like normal winter kill to me. Just cut out all the dead stuff, there's enough new growth that it should be okay.

Did you have a hard winter? Belinda's Dream and many other roses are not cane hardy to below zero, or even below 10 degrees for some roses. Cut the dead canes to the ground and the plant will regrow itself unless an exposed graft was frozen. Did you bury the grafts of grafted roses?

I see some cankered canes, dead black or tan patches. usually with concentric color banding. This is a fungus disease (actually up to 4 different fungi) of the bark. Sometimes canker is secondary to winter damage. Some varieties are extra susceptible, and some seasons it is worse than usual. If is hard to control, but spraying lime sulfur or Daconil in late winter might help. I don't bother, but I have discarded a few varieties for having chronic canker problems in my climate.I wouldn't expect it to be particularly bad in West Texas and guess that most of this is winter damage.

I'd call your local rose society and have a consulting
rosarian come to look at it. It's hard to tell by just
looking at pictures, and it could be a number of different
things.

All your rose needs is a major spring pruning.

1. Cut back All brown canes to an inch or two below the brown. If necessary, cut it back to the ground.

2. On speckled and splotched canes, cut back part way and see if the center of the cane is white (like the white flesh of an apple, as one poster puts it). If the center is brownish, cut the cane back another 4-6 inches. If the center is still brownish, cut back another 4-6 inches (all the way to the ground if necessary).

3. Keep the rest of the rose well-watered (unless nature provides rain) and give it a spring feeding of Rose Tone (available at Lowes).

Do that every spring. Basically, your rose is suffering from cold winter problems--that's all.

Good luck,

Kate

Looks to me like they just need a good pruning. Cut off anything dead or spindly. If you only have 2-3 canes left, that's fine. Probably the horrible wet cold winter did a lot of damage. I had to cut back many of my roses severely this spring. They will come back.

I know this is very worrisome for you...and I don't mean to make light of it, but this is better than my hybrid teas usually look after a regular winter. That's one reason I'm switching to old-fashioned roses, which are much hardier.

As Michael said, if the graft was not frozen, the roses will come back looking beautiful...it may just take a little while. If the graft was frozen, unfortunately, you end up with the little wild red rose.

Overall, your roses look like they're coming back pretty nicely. Don't give up on them yet :)

If you are in an area where you have "zone 6" winters then you need to be aware that some roses are more winter hardy than others. Ones that are not as hardy may die back rather a bit during your winter, and if that happens you'll have a fair bit of pruning to do in the spring.

One of the nice things, and frustrating things, about growing roses is that some of them grow well in colder climates (but then sulk in hot ones), while others LOVE summer heat (but die in cold winters). The more modern roses (such as hybrid teas & floribundas) try to make everyone happy. Sometimes they succeed at that, but at least as often they don't.

Among the older "antique" roses I can easily grow Gallica, Alba, Damask, Centifolia, Moss, Rugosa, and Multiflora roses, (I can even go to garden centers near me and buy Rugosa roses, which I could never do when I lived near Philadelphia), but the warm weather roses, such as the Chinas, Teas, and Noisette roses are usually a ton of work for someone in my cool summer, cold winter climate (& even then the results may well be very frustrating).

If I lived in Charleston, Jacksonville, or Savannah I'd be having the opposite experience.

I can grow Hybrid Teas & Floribundas, but I have to think about what I'm doing, and what I grow (some handle the winter here more easily than others).

MY Belinda's Dream always looks like this in spring. It was discussed here some time ago. It looks like BD is fine with cold temps, so people in colder areas can grow it without much problem, but it really hates crazy temp. swings. I predict that when you start pruning, you will see brown pith even on the canes that look green and will have to cut it to the ground. I usually start with this rose from ground zero every spring. My zone is 6b and none of my other roses,even Teas and chinas, have winter damage comparable to BD. They all have just a minor tip damage, never had to cut them to the ground.
Olga

WOW. That would get to be discouraging!

Jeri

Thank you all. I was thinking that it had to be a disease because if I don't cut all the dead stuff out, it spreads and kills the plant, and we had a pretty mild winter (my zone 6 Texas Panhandle winters are nothing like zone 6 MD or IL winters, LOL!) I'm cutting them back-and you're right- this BD has the brown pith even on the green canes, but Belinda did so much better than my two Franny Kruegers, one of which I comepletely lost, and the other is just one cane sticking out of the ground now. Funny thing is, my big monstous Mons. Tillier never has a problem. She'd take over the whole yard if I let her. Old Blush, in its third year and with no shelter at all from our 70 mph winds, is as tall as me. Baffling, but I am so glad to know that I dodn't have some weird disease going on here. Now I can go order replacements. I didn't want to in case something gross would be in the soil to kill them.
Lavender Lass, I'm glad you're going to make the switch to own-root roses, I think you'll love them. As you can see though, they are not without troubles. Less than those lollipops on a stick, I'm sure, but they still are roses. All of mine are own-root and have been pretty good until this year. I'm sure, as was mentioned, that it was the temperature swings, and not just cold, that got them. You'd think that with my zone, I could grow the old gallicas, rugosas and the like, but they don't like it here- I tried. No, the old trinity- Teas, Chinas and Noisettes, thrive, but apparently some do better with wild temperature changes and wet Springs than others.

I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to write and console me on my problem. Now, me and my friend Visa have some places to oogle.
Thank you!

Are you really in zone 6 Texas? I live 3 hours north of Texas in Tulsa that is zone 7.

Both of my Belinda's Dreams were severely struck this year by the weather. I cut them way back, and was ready to discard them. They have now come back now and look very good. Sometimes I think you need to leave some bad looking canes when you prune to help the rose to grow.

Sammy

When I get the usual winter damage on my roses, it always includes canker on the canes. If I don't prune those canes back to below the canker, it spreads - another reason why spring pruning is so important here. If you cut back all your canes to below the dead or canker infested area you should be fine. Your roses are already sending up new growth, so you know they are alive.

Zones can vary by altitude. I am in zone 7, some say 8, but it's 7. But my street is in a little bowl, and I'm about a week behind the homes up on the hill for blooms and we also get more frost and cooler temps, but less wind. I've never done any winter protection for my roses and I have the grafts above ground for most of them. Most winters it's ok, but this last winter was bad and I had to do extreme prunes on a lot of my roses.

Oh, and Sammy, you're not north of me. LOL! It's more sideways. Three hours north of me is Kansas. According to the zone map, we are zone 6. People say that the zones have changed, and we should be zone 7a, but I've not seen one to that effect. It's zone 6b. I'm 60 miles NE of Amarillo.

Interesting! You can grow the "southern" antiques. Presumably what's driving your selection in roses isn't the winter cold, but the summer heat. The relatively cool summers I get also do that.

York, exactly. You hit the nail on the head. The few snows (and the occasional blizzard- every ten years or so) are balanced by the many many days above 100 here. I kind of like it. I'm from Chicago originally, then we lived in South Texas for a decade before we moved here. I find the Texas Panhandle to be a good balance- we have defined seasons (in South Texas you don't) without the long unbearable gray dreary cold winter. In the winter, we may have a few days to a week of snow, followed by a few weeks of 60 degree weather. This way my kids know what snow is and get to play in it, and it melts before the novelty wears off.

It's like there here in North Georgia too. Probably not as hot (we rarely get to 100) but usually don't get that cold either. This winter was particularly bad. I had an arborist out to my home today to check on a dying pine tree. While he was here I showed him my cryptomeria and he said it was cold damage. Also I had 3 mini boxwood that died over the winter. I thought it was because I pruned them incorrectly last year, but he said it was the cold winter and that many strands of boxwood had the same thing. He also said that they are not dead and if I cut them way down, they would regrow.

Hardiness zones are great, but mother nature doesn't have to pay attention to them.

In the Boston area a "heat wave" is officially defined by the US Weather Service as three days in a row where the temperature is 90 or higher......

There are usually only one or two of those per summer.

;)

LOL! You get used to the heat. Plus it's a dry heat, so it's not too bad. In the summer our humidity is usually around 16% or so. Except last year, which was unusually wet. The darn mosquitoes liked to have eaten me alive, we usually don't have them in the summer. :P

Ah. In Boston, being at the mouths of a few rivers where they drain into the ocean, when it's warm it's always sticky.

Ah. In Boston, being at the mouths of a few rivers where they drain into the ocean, when it's warm it's always sticky.