I have vague criteria, ie. I like single or semi-double, spreading with good foliage, healthy and floriferous. But, reality usually dictates that availability is the first criteria - that is, is this rose in front of me, waiting to be sold OR, is this rose listed in a catalogue or online and I have the money in the bank to pay for it? Next question, where have I got a space for this. Because I hardly ever plan to get a specific plant for a certain place at a particular time - serendipity is the absolute prime mover. Of course, I can then rejig my desires to fit in EXACTLY with the newly aquired plant and I will guarantee coming to love it unless it fails spectacularly and, in later months and years, I will come to believe that such and such a plant was always meant to be in that very spot - chosen through my superior acumen, style and class (ahem) In other words, I am just a wilfully capricious flibberty-gibbert with no real sense of decision or planning. Even the decisions of selecting a rose are momentary thoughts which change with every new page or screen and ultimately, it really doesn't matter that much once it is in the ground. Naturally, I woulabjure this mode of operation for my customers, insisting on carefully thought out plans....but then, we come to actually buying stuff and it all goes out the window again. Gods, what a useless answer, Belle. Wish I could claim more discernment.

1.) Will it thrive in my climate
2.) Will it fit my color scheme
3.) Is it disease resistant
4.) Does it fit my idea of rose beauty (soft color/very double)
5.) Does it repeat
6.) Does it have a strong fragrance

My garden is so stuffed that I haven't purchased any new roses this year. I may replace roses that aren't remarkable at some point, but I'll probably replace with something other than roses.

Fragrance is number one. Coming way after that is suitability for my climate (disease resistance) and amount of bloom.

I am besotted by roses that I never thought I would care for; Desprez a Fleur Juane, Champneys Pink Cluster. One whiff of others and I quickly forgive those who irritate me with their faults; The stingy Buff Beauty and Cl Clotilde and her divine blooms WHEN she is not balling.

I have come to the conclusion that I am doomed to continue to buy roses, grow them on in the pot ghetto and, then, decide what to do with them. Out to the ditch line (new bed coming!) for the non fragrant, diseased, uber thorny sink-or-swim test garden.

Interestingly, many are finding their permanent homes in quite an easy way for me, now. The locations just seem to pop into consciousness. I have stopped flogging myself over these decisions recently. I have placed Ms Atwood, Marie Daley and Crepuscule near the door yard because they are mostly thornless. Clytemnestra is on the east side of the canyon of trees and will soon be joined by Cl Devoniensis and Rev D'Or. I would love to intertwine...

Oops, I have drifted far afield from the topic, so I shall bring this to a close.

I feel like the criteria for my garden was imposed upon me. Though I recognize, Belle, that your list is quite relevant for most gardeners, it really doesn't come into play for me because of my climate, small garden space, and intolerance for blackspot. That leaves me with very few choices about which to get choosy. To be honest with myself, I'd have to say shrub size is first. I simply can't fit large bushes no matter what stellar qualities they have unless I wanted only a few bushes (which may very well be the way my garden will have to go). Disease resistance is next so that reduces my choices down to chinas, teas, noisettes and a few polyanthas that don't mind my soil, because I refuse to tolerate ugly and/or defoliated bushes. They need to look good just by feeding and watering. Next would be thrips. I've got two baby DdB's in pots that I don't dare plant (even if I had a spot) because she was a thrip magnet last year. So I tend to pick darker colors for that reason AND that I get tired of pastel pink fading to almost white everywhere I look. Thorns didn't enter into the decisions when I was filling my garden because I had no idea about the differences and how hostile some roses can be. I would probably pay more attention to that now, but it wouldn't make me give up Cl Maman Cochet, so I guess it's really not a factor. Would I really want to eliminate MORE roses from the list to choose from? I've started thinking more about flower size though. I'm getting irritated with roses that bear really small zinnia-looking flowers. I like LP's small flowers because they don't seem small - they just are what they are, and they don't get smaller in summer. But a few of my teas are bothersome that way. I really like big, fat flowers. Color & fragrance choices among teas and noisettes are minimal. They are what they are.

I think I would add one other criteria. I'm starting to feel like the rose must thrill me and not simply grow well. Maybe that will be my next expedition...the quest for thrilling roses to replace the blah ones which may simply be a matter of propagating the thrillers that I have to replace the ones that don't. I have become harder to please as I mature in this gardening life, AND actual roses don't always live up to their glamour shots.

Sherry

Mine is bloom form and color first, then fragrance, then size, then how well it repeats. I'll keep a rose that doesn't perform well if it's outstanding looking or one with great fragrance if I don't really love the bloom.

I cannot, for now, add any more roses, but if I could:

1. Beauty of flower - far and away the main decider for me, I get entranced by some roses, who knows why.
2. Beauty/gracefulness of habit - this surprised me when I realized that I cared that much about the foliage, but the sheer charm of the way my Mlle. Jeanne Phillipe grows taught me that I do.
3. Can it handle my pot/balcony/afternoon sun/heat situation. Alas, #1 and #2 tend to make me forget #3. But I know it's really important.
4. Is the fragrance strong? If so, I DON'T want it. I know this is heresy to most of you, but it works for me, especially since a delicate Tea fragrance is what I can handle AND Teas will grow here, mercifully.
5. Size - I should really have put this at the top, as it is the dealbreaker. Pots and Balcony add up to SMALL.

That's a good question really, since sometimes I just fall in love with some plant and it does not have any particular pattern - but I must have it. Luckily, for my garden space and wallet limitations, that does not happen that often, so normally more objective things play.

1. Bloom form/color. There are few that I really do not like and no matter what other excellent qualities they posses, I won't place them in my garden.

2. Unusualiness. I try to avoid just another pink rose thing. I find it to be a bit of a problem with many HPs and Austins, since they tend to look rather similar to each other.

3. Will it grow in my climate/soil. My current garden definitely is an upgrade from z5 one, but there still are roses that won't do well, or are picky about the soil, position, etc.

4. Shade tolerance. I try to avoid roses that need 100% full sun. There are enough pretty musks around to fill my whole garden. ;)

5. Disease resistance. It really cuts on maintenance to grow things that do not get every fungy out there on weekly basis. I can deal with a few if I really like some other feature, but that's one of the first things I look for in the comments.

6. Habbit/size/vigor. I prefer vigorous growers, especially with climbers, also I have limited space, so have to consider the eventual size of my plants.

7. Fragrance - generally I try to buy only fragrant roses, but often I make exceptions for those that score high in unusual-iness. Unfortunately many new floribundas are non fragrant, but they make it up with crazy colors.

8. Rebloom. With my rather small garden, once bloomers really have to be special to make it.

For me:
1.It has to touch my soul (not sure how to define is better, but some roses just do nothing for me)
2.It has to be fragrant
3.Good looking plant, healthy leaves, no bare knees, leaves all the way to the ground
4. Healthy no spay or with reasonable spray program (not more than just few times during growing season)
5.Repeat is not a factor. If anything, I prefer oncebloomers with spectacular spring show.

Olga

1. I will not compromise on beauty of flower.

2. Suitability to climate and site.

3. I am a sucker for anything, the first two criteria being satisfied, with a good story attached,

4. Prefer off patent, dont want to tell friends "No, I can't give you cuttings."

5. And, I do love big, blowsy roses with attitude, Polka, MAC, Golden Celebration, Cl. Aime Vibert, Capt. Thomas, Mermaid etc.

I narrow it down by:
1) Availability
2) Color
3) Size
4) Disease resistance
5) Bloom repeat

Fragrance doesn't matter much to me, as I don't have a great sense of smell. The roses I can smell are delightful to me, but not a criteria.

1. Like it or not, my first criterion has to be whether a rose will survive and do well in my harsh environment.
2. Having said that, a rose does have to have that certain something which thrills me or otherwise I need very little excuse to "send it away".
3. I respond very strongly to color, not only in the individual rose, but how different colors will interact with each other in the garden. Also, bright red or orange set my teeth on edge and I avoid them.
4. In theory the beauty of the bush as a whole is very important to me, but in practice that tends to fall by the wayside if I really love the blooms. Yet, the appearance of the garden as a whole will suffer if most of the contents are not aesthetically pleasing as a whole.
5. Disease is not a huge concern for me but mildew does rear its ugly head now and then and I find it to be seriously ugly. If a rose continues to mildew it's gone.

Ingrid

My criterion is quite simple in theory, but, not quite so simple in practice.

I chose roses that should grow well in my garden with no chemical support.

Robert

My garden has been planted from the house outwards and the criteria have changed as I move outward. Initially--close to the house--I wanted sure winners: fragrance, good rebloom, disease-resistance, thornless, in that order. The next stage was putting in reliable representatives of every class of rose and the history of roses. I also choose roses for friends, family and cats either by name or color, ie Kent for my brother Kent or Buff Beauty for my buff-coloured cat Mia-Nina. As I've discovered which roses do best here I've added more and more of those, ie. rugosas and hybrid musks. And I like to help keep found roses and obscure/unpopular, even unlovely roses in commerce, so I have a fair number of those. Of course, there is always room for those that pull my heart regardless of criteria. Color and bloom shape have never been important--I love them all--except as a deciding factor between two choices.

Hardiness for my zone 6 garden.

Tolerance (with reasonable distance) to Black Walnut (no rose except muliflora is truly tolerant within the drip line). For me this is a crap shoot but usually multiflora root stock works well as long as it is a reasonable distance from the trees.

Disease resistance. This means rugosa, gallica (some) and a few Buck or Kordes roses in the modern catagory.

Fragrance

Foliage color

Flower time and color

Now I'm not really adding roses because of the above. There just are not enough hardy, disease resistant, fragrant roses that fit the bill. I don't spray fungicides or insecticides.

Barbara

I fall in love with beauty and fragrance, then eliminate those that are susceptible to disease or unhappy with my growing conditions.

Here we have minimal winter chill, alkaline soil, and weather that fosters rust and powdery mildew. Most roses, though, are delighted with what we can offer.

I do a single yearly spray of a copper-based fungicide at winter pruning time.

Rosefolly

Like Rosefolly, beauty and fragrance are what attract me in the first place...but now that I have decided life is too short to grow roses that are not at least somewhat cane hardy in my zone and also since I have entirely stopped spraying, true hardiness and disease resistance are bumping the purely aesthetic requirements down a bit. Still, if I read about a rose that sounds good in all other ways but has little to no fragrance, I move on.

I guess i'm just easy. I plant some roses for form, some for color, some for fragrance. Some I've planted because of a name, historic significance, the breeder. I even plant out of sentimentality. Once we came across a house that had appeared to have lain empty for some time. It was surrounded by roses that weren't in bloom at the time. I created in my head a whole story about the person who had lived there and loved the roses and was now perhaps dead or in a nursing home. I decided to take cuttings and grow at least one rose in their honor. The cuttings were all Queen Elizabeth. I gave some away and planted one in the garden. It means something to me.

I've really enjoyed reading all the responses. I had used msrose's list as a starting point, and it's great that people added more like rebloom. I'm glad to see that I'm not completely alone in putting so much on fragrance.

Several people mentioned that roses must touch them or appeal to them in some way that goes beyond the practical. It's not always enough to have the rose that is suited to the climate. That might be an entirely new thread: those roses for which we're willing to work a little harder or put up with some disease, etc.

When I lived in the south, disease resistance was #1 and then fragrance. If they were healthy and smelled good, they were automatically beautiful to me.

Living up here, things are different. I planted the garden with disease resistance in mind because I'd just trained myself to look for that. I am not really shovel pruning anything, because nothing has shown up except mildew on Zeffy and I'm waiting to see what happens.

So, I don't know what my criteria are as everything seems pretty easy so far, health wise. So if health isn't my first criteria, what is? I don't know - maybe beauty and fragrance instead.

One thing I've noticed is that I will go and see how the singles and semi doubles are first. I think I must love them most. I like Indigo for its color and KvD for its perfume. But Felicia, Little butterflies, Bouquet Parfait and Gartendirector OL, Lyda Rose, Clair Matin, Excellenz V S, just really are beautiful to me. Not many petals there. The heavily petaled blooms aren't as wonderful to me as I thought they'd be. Odd, huh?

Gean

Hardiness and health come first as I don't spray or winter cover in my cold zone. I grow all kinds of roses but large shrubs with the flowers at sniffing height are the most important. I like to walk along paths with tall roses on both sides. This means that the majority are onceflowering roses but some bourbons and HPs do well for me.

I have a fair amount with strong fragrance already,.. so while I really like that, it's not as MUCH of a draw as it was previously. But I do really love when a rose wafts.

My two highest criteria are:
A: BEAUTY
I tend to like pinks, white-blends, pale yellows, peaches and raspberries. I like some singles, but mostly doubles... I guess I either really like something or I don't. I like Judy the Obscure just as much as I love William Shakespeare 2000, La Reine, Lady Banks, La France and Penelope... and they're all totally different in bush form, bloom form and bloom color.

B: HEAT TOLERANCE
Doesn't matter how gorgeous something is if it just looks like crap my hot/dry climate.

I prefer rebloom... so I only buy a rose that doesn't have it if it's spectacular to me. Examples: Lady Banks and Alchemist. I don't mind having something that I look forward to for a year, in some ways it makes it more special that you only see it once a year. However, realistically, in a relatively small garden, getting more rebloom is great and gives you more "bang" for your space.

My climate/conditions so far haven't given me any problems with disease, etc... so it's really more about being able to survive the heat without looking like a crispy, and just generally being beautiful.

I do have a slight preference for roses that have variable colored blooms. (ie like teas which change from their bud color to young blossom color to their mature blossom color, etc... ) but there are plenty of roses on my top 10 list that don't do that at all... (like say, Jude the Obscure.)

Choosing and placing a new rose is predicated on whatever plants are already around or will be in the future. Since I grow lots of fruit, annuals and biennials, in a chaotic allotment, my roses are not sophisticated or refined - they must look relatively simple, somewhat wild to hold their own in a mass of moon daisies, foxgloves, calendula, penstemon, gypsophila, escholtzia, orlaya,ursinia, osteospermum, wallflowers, incarvillea, gillia, flax, poppies, raspberries, apples, sweet peas.... or whatever else has taken my fancy this year (annuals are just so easy and cheap, grow them in weeks, rip them out and pop in another - piece of cake). If I want lush, huge blossom, I grow paeonies or dahlias or oriental poppies (have finally ordered some 'superpoppies' this year - they are not easy to find in the UK). I don't like to see any areas of bare soil or mulch - every tiny space has a plant, even if it is primarily a ground-cover such as ajuga or salvia. Consequently, I don't have a need for large, shapely specimen rosebushes because mine will have to tough it out in something of a jungle. I guess I do pay attention to colour but am not averse to startling contrasts - currently, I am loving acid greens with purples (hakenochloa aureum, campanula 'Kent Belle' - perfect for a deep pink Schoeners' nutkana or Pat Austin to nestle in with them. And so on.......

Like Mariannese said hardiness and health come first as I don't spray or winter cover in my cold zone. After that size is important since I don't have room for anymore large shrubs/climbers. Then I want fragrance and a pretty flower.
Remy

I start by excluding roses that either
a) won't grow decently in my conditions,
b) I just don't think are pretty.
In the first category go most modern roses, it seems, including the English roses, which need too much food and water. Generally the old roses appear thriftier and more drought tolerant. And I avoid Rugosas, which I believe, perhaps erroneously, wouldn't like my heavy soil and summer heat and drought.
The second category is most roses that have large blooms on sparse stiff plants: the modern Hybrid Tea style. I generally avoid scentless roses. I don't care for low-growing reflowering roses bred for ongoing bright color but lacking individual personality. I generally don't like very hard bright colors, though I'll make an exception for Rosa foetida's supremely bright yellow, nor for garish bicolors.
We have low disease pressure, though we do have mildew, but I try to avoid roses that get a lot of disease year in year out.
Having excluded the roses listed above, I look for beauty of flower and plant, fragrance, general good health, vigor and thriftiness. I collect roses and like to give a home to relatively rare varieties; and I like having a variety of classes in my garden, and variety of bloom, scent, habit, foliage, hips, thorns. We have a relatively mild climate and a range of conditions in the garden, or rather gardens, so I can find places for plants having varying requirements, being able to grow both tender roses (though they did get nailed last winter, perhaps the coldest since 1985) and roses that require winter chill.
Melissa

For me Color is my first criteria..then disease resistance. For fragrance I have DD. I know she is a PITA..but I am willing to mess with her because of her beauty and fragrance. I love fragrance but it is a luxury where I live.

Will it survive -27 F. with very little work on my part??? That leaves a very short list...after that fragrance and color.

Sometimes I just can't resist a great deal, like the $3 John Cabot roses from Lowe's on their own root (no graft!) but I wish the deer were a little less interested in them. They're planted on the corners of my kitchen garden and I think I need more catmint and lavender around them :)

1. DISEASE RESISTANCE in a humid warm southeastern US climate. And a subset here for many areas of the yard: shade tolerance. We don't use inorganic sprays. This is a deal breaker if a rose doesn't have it.

2. FEW THORNS or at least nothing like a rugosa. A deal breaker for most locations.

3. ATTRACTIVENESS OF THE ENTIRE PLANT. I want to like it when it's not in bloom too--much as I feel about rhododendrons, azaleas, and camellias in the yard when they're not in bloom (which is most of the time). A few roses here in zone 7 are evergreen (teas, especially) and that quality is a huge plus. A deal breaker criteria if I really don't like the looks of the whole plant much at all. (Most non-climbing hybrid teas would probably fall into this deal-breaker category, though not all.)

4. REPEAT BLOOMING. Not a deal breaker for some locations here, but for most locations, a once-bloomer is a deal breaker. By growing roses, we're looking for summer and fall color that isn't provided by the other plants we have in the yard. (We do have some once-bloomers that I couldn't resist, though.)

5. SCENT. Not a deal breaker, but the thing that helps to decide in the end between two highly desirable roses that roughly meet other criteria. Most of the roses I've ordered have some scent.

6. VARIETY. This is usually easy to satisfy, since it opens up possibilities more than closing them down:

A. Good variety in bloom forms--all the way from singles to high-centered or cabbagy doubles--but overall I'd like more roses that are semi-doubles with wavy petals and if I had to have just one form, this would be it. Those are much harder to find, though, so mostly we have doubles with a couple of singles. I like blousy doubles quite well too, but many of the doubles are tighter--like General Schablikine that we're also both crazy about.

B. Good variety in bloom size, attached to plants of different heights and spreads. Most blooms are intermediate in size, but the eye's sweeping view of the roses, either in a vase or in the landscape, is enhanced by some tiny rose blooms and some huge ones, on plants with differing growth habits.

C. Good variety in colors within the yard as a whole, but tied to particular color intentions for the particular spot I'm thinking about placing it. For any one spot, I usually have in mind a particular color for combining with some other roses or other plants. Or for a longer sweep, I often have in mind some repetition of color and/or form even if not using the same variety to accomplish that. (Example: for standing out against a soft pink and yellow overall background, General Schablikine will work to approximately repeat Cinco De Mayo's bloom color--though not its form or leaf colors.)

D. Good variety in overall plant size and habit. We like a layered look from front to back and are not into straight rows of roses or other plants in any location. Good variety would include some climbers and some roses rambling about on the surface too, as well as bushes of all sizes.

Mary