BEST of luck to you, dear! It may work fine, but if it doesn't, try, try again, until you get a routine that works for you. I've propagated dozens, and, by this time, probably hundreds of roses from cuttings, for my own garden and for friends; and I've mailed off and received by mail many cuttings from which I and others have gotten new roses. It's a wonderful activity, putting another piece of gardening in the gardener's hands. I do ask you to consider whether a recent rose may still protected against unauthorized reproduction, not as a legal matter, but as a moral one. Hybridizers who make such wonderful new roses deserve to profit from it. However, it's easy for me to be moral on this subject as I grow almost exclusively old and older roses (and that's another reason for growing them). Good luck, and congratulations on starting! Melissa P.S. I don't know much about rooting roses in greenhouses, but I suspect the ziplocs over the pots may be overkill.

"..... I agree that the H. Gigs and Banksiae should be good bets for us. I may have mentioned that we took cuttings from a Belle Portugaise that we found up near Francesco Franceschi's old home on the Riviera in Santa Barbara. The cuttings rooted easily and it looks like one is going to scramble up a tree for us. The plant is vigorous and the leaves are truly "gigantic"! I wish there were more Hybrid Banksiae available (hint, hint to hybridizers) too as they truly do love Santa Barbara. We adore the yellow Lady Banks but it blooms just once a year in March and offers no scent... A question: which H. gigs do you all recommend?" You have the number one 'Gig', Belle Portuguese. So my top recommendation would go to Fortune's Double Yellow. Supposedly, it can reach 39 feet. Blooms only once, but the show is beyond description. I love everything about that plant. The foliage looks like something out of a Chinese painting on silk. And I'm sure the Chinese DID paint it. That's where Fortune discovered it. I will add that we used to cut branches from ours, and the blooms would continue opening for a week or so: much like forced fruit tree blossoms. Ours was planted in a tiny, horrid scrap of a spot, at the southwest corner of an office building, surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, and adjacent a bank of heat-belching AC condenser units...in Mississippi, which is hot, even in the shade. That rose got no shade. Windswept - hot.... probably not too different from a summer in the Gobi Desert. The spot of soil was maybe four feet wide and six feet long, with retainer walls on two sides, condensers on one side, and the building on the other. Two feet of soil, and then fresh construction debris below. (wood scraps, red clay, red sand, concrete slurry, broken cinderblocks, fake stucco scraps...First rose I ever planted. Beginner's luck. What did I know?). Anyway, ours leaned itself through a five-foot decorative fence, and grew to maybe seven feet tall by ten wide by eight deep. Basically evergreen. Astonishingly beautiful in its one long burst of bloom. In better conditions, with something tall to climb, and with less restricted roots, I'm sure that twenty feet could be a reasonable expectation. Australia is blessed with a number of Gigantea hybrids dating from the 1920s. Alister Clark is the hero who created them. The most famous is Lorraine Lee. I'm not sure how many have made it to the USA. They may be undergoing quarantine right now. The Rose World seems to be imperiled, and I hope that Giganteas don't get lost in the panic. Anyway, Australia has even more horrid summers than does the American South, and Alister Clark's Giganteas seem to have weathered such extreme conditions very well. BTW, speaking of Rose Heroes: have you read about what's being done with Rosa Bracteata? (or was being done, until the implosion of the market). We're headed back to Mississippi (At least I had a few years of growing OGRs in a quasi-European climate...dream come true...), and I can't wait to grow what few Hybrid Bracteatas have made it into commerce. Mermaid, the most famous old Bracteata hybrid, is untroubled by Gulf South heat and humidity, and so I have high hopes for the new introductions. And time is running out to order from Vintage Gardens, who have (already rooted), 'Montecito'. Their description: "A massive tree climber, sensitive to cold even in our normally mild climate, Montecito was bred in Italy, a cross between Rosa gigantea and Rosa brunonii. Large, fragrant, single white blooms." In Santa Barbara, I think the cold may be less an issue for you. Sounds exactly right, considering your desire for something truly rampant. I notice that Vintage will custom-root the original species Gigantea... something I wish I'd known a decade back.

Wow, gldno, you've done some research! Yep, we get a whiff of the Gulf Stream warmth here, though we already had a first frosty night. You'd be amazed if you checked the climate of NW Norway! My berries are red-orange, the trees really look lovely when full of them. I usually cook them with apples, but this year the apple harvest has been poor. Other than that, I've got pears, cherries, gooseberries, red and black currants, strawberries, and I'm trying to grow grapes (first year, a very hardy Latvian variety named Zilga.) I've worked for one summer as a farm harvester in Minnesota, so it was interesting to compare what grows where. The farm grew many things that I could only grow in a greenhouse, such as eggplant, chiles, basil, zucchini. Things that were difficult for them included fruit trees and onions. Natalie, I've never been to Belarus. I guess you miss it much.

I appreciate the comments and concerns about maintenance, and the following is NOT a rant, but rather my attempt at clarifying the specifics of this site. These are things I've thought and talked about with the caretaker. I first approached him about this back in early Summer. Being recognized as a historic site by the state of NJ, they do get quite a few hands working on keeping things up. Volunteers from Rutgers University have been coming by this Autumn to clean, prime, and repaint the fence. The small water feature was donated by a church member, and installed by the caretaker. All the plants you see in there already were donated -- and in many cases planted -- by church members. They get together for leaf raking and shredding in Autumn. Brian, the caretaker, has shared with me his desire to create something really beautiful, but he's limited by cost. He's been expanding beds, but doesn't have much more than divisions of church members' plants to fill them. Since he lives on-site, this is effectively his back yard, and I saw him out there almost daily during the growing season -- he also maintains a small veggie garden for the church which I didn't photograph. [The church is across the street from my job, and down the street from the Starbucks from where I collect used coffee grounds daily.] I told him that a few old roses could make good "anchor shrubs" around which he can continue to spread the companion plants he already has in abundance. This is not an empty stretch of land that some people "say" they'd like improved but don't do anything about it -- and this is why I took interest in it. When I was in Buffalo, I was approached by my "block club" about helping to put together a proposal for a city grant to buy plants for the empty space at the end of the street. We did get a few volunteers for helping to put it together, but I did much of the work by myself. As my free time started to shrink from classes and a busier work schedule, "maintenance" became me going down there once a week to pull weeds and pick up garbage. Once things were planted, the attitudes I kept hearing from non-participating neighbors about how "the college kids will ruin it" morphed into "no one will take care of it" -- and it was the latter which became true. So in essence, I lived on a block full of people complaining about how the neighborhood looked crappy and no one was doing anything about it, yet they themselves were reticent to make the first step -- or even keep things going after others got things started for them. I lived there for three years, and became well aware -- as they knew I am a "downstater" myself -- of that "blame everyone else" attitude for their deep-seated Rust Belt woes. What I at first thought would be an example of the "Stone Soup" story coming to life and igniting a desire for further improvement became an example of how throwing some money at something isn't enough to make a change -- you need people willing to keep it going. But this isn't what I find at this location. Instead, I find someone with the desire, energy, and know-how to make something beautiful here, but is limited by funds. Yes, there are plenty of roses I can't grow in my yard which I'd like to see in this garden, but this isn't going to be "my garden". I'd like to see them there because they'd be appropriate there, and the caretaker agrees. As for tree maintenance, as far as I can tell none is performed, other than raking leaves. I will speak to Brian in more detail about having roses up in them, but he has already expressed interest when I asked if he'd want that. In the meantime, I don't have any roses on-hand right now that will be planted there. I do have an order for Spring, but that's it. I also have my own "inventory" from which I can propagate, as well as whatever I can propagate from the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, and whatever I can get donated. If it turns out I have too much, any "leftovers" will go back to the HRF. So, in the end, this will be about me saying to Brian "Hey, I have this, and I think it'd work over there....want it? Oh, and what about putting this one over here...it'll get this big eventually, so you'll need that much space." He's really the designer. I'm just sharing my rose info with -- and trying to "make plants happen" for -- him. :-) ~Christopher