I also have a very old Peace rose. From where it was planted (alongside of the driveway, in a long row of various bush HTs planted, we think, in the late 1940s or early 1950s), I can only surmise that the original was the bush form. However, a gigantic pomegranite bush has arisen just behind it, and by the time I first saw the Peace rose it was definitely climbing. The bottom is in full shade from the bush. I hired a gardener once who unfortunately pruned it as a normal bush HT growing in full sun. Disaster. It put out tons of new growth, which immediately became covered in rust. I left it alone for a few years, and it started to climb again. I helped it up into the canopy of the pomegranite, and now the canes don't bloom until they get way up there into the sunlight (10-12 feet up). Then they produce the most amazingly huge (7-8 inches across) blooms. Luckily our bedroom window on the second floor faces exactly at this rose, so we can enjoy its beautiful bloom. Not much disease at all, except for this Spring when it has rained and rained and is still raining... I am glad I read this thread - I didn't realize that Peace had deteriorated in commerce over the years - I will definitely root some cuttings of this old one. Thanks for the info! Jackie

This thread makes me smile. Jackie, I love the fact that you are living and gardening in a place that holds so much history for your family. I have an own-root Peace in my garden, a virus-indexed plant that got from Vintage in 2008. It was originally planted in my Rose Field among similar HTs. Life happened, my Rose Field grew over with weeds and invasives and I didn't have what it took to keep it up at the time, and Peace seemed to be lost. Last spring, I waded through that section of the garden and discovered that Peace was still there ... small and scrawny, but very much alive. I carefully dug it up, and it is now planted in my front yard HT garden, with other own-root HTs, where it receives much better care and it is thriving. These HTs seem to need more in the way of nutrition, so it gets fed regularly. I do my best to be as good as I can about keeping to my twice-monthly fungicide schedule, too. In return for my care and attention, Peace is growing and doing very, very nicely ... producing the large, bright green foliage that I think of when I imagine Peace. My goal for this plant is to keep it healthy and vigorous and to bud a copy of it onto rootstock to see what a virus-free Peace can do when grown as it was originally intended to be. When the plant gets bigger (it's about a foot-and-a-half tall right now), I will propagate own-root plants and get them out of here into other homes who will also care for and preserve them. (The photo of Peace and her little bug friend was taken yesterday morning.)

Update! I got all 8 roses in the ground today, and after 4 hours that is a magical journey I never plan to undertake again. I only had space to plant them about 3-4' apart, and I amended the soil with peat moss. Luckily this area has nice black dirt, no idea why, but it's one of the areas with better soil quality. I would have gotten a picture, but by the time I thought to, I was too filthy to go back inside the house to find the camera. Some highlights include spraying myself in the face with the hose TWICE, digging up a 6' honeysuckle tree to be planted elsewhere (it just showed up one day and I decided to keep it), clearing out the whole bed of overgrown daylilies and Bishop's Weed, and having to eventually take off my shoes due to caked on mud and just go at this project barefoot and crazy-looking as God intended. I also learned that accidentally touching rose fertilizer pellets with your bare hands hurts like hell. Good to know! Thank you everyone for your help! I will try and update if I have any further news as to how things are going.

It was not powdery mildew, it was downey mildew, which is a completely different disease. PM is common on roses, and I have been told is frequently a sign that they are not getting enough water. I have successfully gotten rid of it by watering the subject rose more (I don't spray my garden normally). Sometimes young roses get it, and grow out of it. It does not kill roses. Downey mildew, on the other hand is an awful awful, disease which seems to occur (at least around here) when we have had a very wet, warm Spring. The year we lost the old Peace rose to it we also lost 2 giant old tea roses (which luckily I had already rooted cuttings from, and had young plants of in my garden) which we think were over 80 years old at the time. I saved another one by drenching it and spraying it with AGRI-FOS, as well as constantly cutting off the dying canes (they die from the top down). All of them except the Peace rose were growing next to each other, so I even got my DH to dig up all of the soil around where the dead ones had been growing, to about 2 feet down, and we replaced it with new soil. None of the roses growing there ever since have gotten DM. I keep an eye out for it, but it has not reappeared for over 10 years, for which I am extremely grateful. Jackie