Eric, if you go to Pickering's website, they have instructions on planting bare root roses. Follow their instrucions and you can't go wrong. A very important instruction is to hill up bare roots with soil (10") for winter protection and drying, which is sometimes forgotten. There has always been a planting instruction sheet in my orders, so I'm surprised too that there wasn't one in your order.

I think it's the wax on the canes, not the tiny buds you see there that caused the problem. The cheaper growers wax canes so that they stay green on store shelves. I've never had a waxed cane do well even where I am (and in Coastal Cal I'm in a much cooler zone than Arizona). The buds were fine -- leave them on. But ditch the waxed cane bareroots, unless you can imagine the plant without those particular waxed canes and still see a decent plant worth buying. Some bareroots are waxed only at the tops, and those ones are usually ok, because the bottom of the cane is all you need. And by the way, I've tried everything from fingernails to credit cards to hiar driers to get that wax off before hot weather burns the cambium layer of the canes -- nothing seems to help those canes to survive. They all die anyway.

Mine that I have in the house under grow lights seem to hold their leaves pretty well, but the ones I have outside almost never seem to have leaves on them, or not many. They do flower like crazy though. I'm not sure if it's the heat (I'd assume they're subjected to worse where they naturally grow), but they're not in direct sun so that may also be part of it. As the others had mentioned, a picture would help a lot. Check to make sure the caudex (trunk) isn't squishy at all. if it's firm then it's fine and probably just hasn't decided to grow leaves yet.

Quick answer, buy where you get value for your money. Know what value looks like. IF you decide to buy bare roots, there are three things I think you should look for. 1) are the canes green? It they are black or brown or green with black/brown splotches, KNOW that those canes are dead already and imagine the bush without them. If the canes are coated with a greenish wax, use your fingernail to flake off a bit of the wax and check the color of the canes. Greenish wax makes a lot of canes look ok. 2) have the canes already broken dormancy? Are there leaves at leaf nodes, even if they are dead? Can you see where the dead leaves from earlier this year are fingerpruned off? Are the canes starting to get wrinkled from lack of moisture IN the plant (that was lost when the earlier leaf break happened?) Each leaf axil on a healthy rose cane has three buds. Two are backups. But does the cane look as if either of the two backups will make it? 3) does the bagged up root mass that you can't see have enough roots to support the canes you can see? Two stories. I had Don Juans growing on my porch in Algiers Point, and I wanted to add a fourth one. I found one bagged with really good canes, and I got it home and found that there was a huge bright scar where half the roots had been pulled off in processing. I should have returned it. I didn't. With the same care that had supported the other three, #4 died. I remember that mistake. And how I confused densely packed sawdust for good roots. That lead to my not making a mistake several years later when I saw (insert music) from across a crowded room/nursery a mass of seven of the best looking canes I had ever seen on a body bag rose. Perfection. It was Purple something and it was a climber. And I grabbed the base of the bag, and there was close to nothing there. Not even much sawdust. Maybe one woody root. I knew that that root hadn't supported seven one inch canes in the growing fields. I put it back. And remember it to this day. Ann, putting off going out weeding.