This morning, Cliff posted the following comments on the very l-o-n-g "Zillions of Roses . . ." thread. Because it might be missed there by some of you, I'm taking the liberty of re-posting it here.

Posted by desertcliff z9 CA highdesert (My Page) on Fri, May 13, 11 at 5:19

My sincere apologies for not surfacing earlier, but I've been digging out from under a mountain of email messages and orders since the sale began and only now am starting to see some daylight.

A few answers to your questions.

These are not the bare root roses you're used to ordering, which are usually dormant plants that have been stored at cool temperatures. These are mature roses, dug from the garden while actively growing. They're cut back, soaked, the roots are washed and then they're carefully packed for shipping. Total labor from start to finish has been averaging nearly an hour per plant. Reports from all over the country are that these roses start to grow as soon as they're planted in pots or in the ground. For those of you who might be worried about it being too hot in your area, in 2006 I moved my entire garden from the low desert to the new location in the high desert. We started the move in August, with daytime high temperatures above 110 and often above 115 degrees. Roses were dug from the garden and planted in pots (we weren't ready to plant them in the ground), and out of 5,000 roses, we lost very, very few.

Don't worry about payment. Invoices are prepared after I know the actual shipping costs. I'm preparing invoices when I can grab a minute or two and have set up a mechanism to pay by credit card via the website -- or by check.

Are there great roses left? For sure! While the response has been terrific, with 1000 roses already in new homes in 37 states, that means that there are still 4000 roses in the garden, and many (most?) are truly incredible, and a significant number of them are quite rare. I'm now sending out updates with the names of the varieties still available, by type of rose. The first of these updates, on hybrid perpetuals, went out a few hours ago.

Please know that this is not, nor was it intended to be a source of great income. In fact, given how labor and time intensive this is, we lost money on all of the potted roses we sold and we just about break even on the minis and minifloras from the garden. The overriding purpose of this sale is to save these roses and to ensure that they will have good homes. I'm maintaining a database that includes the name of each rose shipped along with contact information. This way, should there be an interest in commercializing any of the roses in the future, hopefully the new owners will be willing to provide cuttings.

Thank you all most sincerely for your patience and understanding, and for your support.

Cliff