The article on the Paul Barden site was by Ed Wilkinson curator of the San Jose Rose Garden not Paul Barden. Any further infomation/sitelinks would be appreciated.
Mark.......

I was at Sangerhausen this spring and it is the most amazing place...37 acres of roses. It is funded by the town of Sangerhausen and is located in what was East Germany. It is a Rosarium-the aim is to have examples of all avaliable roses..not just old roses-the vast part of the collection is modern roses..emmense beds of HT's and Floribundas that are grown and bedded out yearly..vast beds of all sort of climbers grown on posts and taken down for the winter plus decorative plantings with ornamentals and trellis and so on..they are expanding constantly. I was there for the Gallicas and was not disapointed. It is a beautiful place-but not easy to get to and the ex-East Germany designation has the additional difficulty that very few people speak any English-they learned Russian in school. The last time I checked the web-site was only in German. It is hard to communicate with them. They dont seem to have a mechanism in place for answering questions. The new Director speaks some English and is a very forward thinking sort of guy. It will be intersting to see how that changes things. He is personally very interested in the OGR's and the number of beds of those has expanded. The strangest thing I saw there was OGR's grown on pillars to save space...the idea of a previous director I gathered. I had no idea it could be done and the heights some of these roses had reached was astonishing. I want to go back-I did not get to see the greenhouses where they grow the plants out...they have to replace a good part of the HT's and so on yearly because of the difficult climate-wonderful place.

patricia

Patricia, thanks so much for sharing your trip to Sangerhausen. It sounds like an amazing place. A real jewel.
When i was looking threw the roses Bregmann had posted on HMF of Sangerhausen the 1st thing i noticed was i only recognized 5% of the names. There must be alot of old roses out of commerce.I find this truly amazing. I would definetly like to make that trip myself...Thnx.......mark

The Combined Rose List, which is easily the most complete source for roses in commerce, lists about 14,000 varieties. The Modern Roses 12 database now includes over 33,000 distinct varieties. So yes, there are many roses not in commerce currently.

It is great that Sangerhausen is doing so well these days. It was severely damaged during World War II and the aftermath. Many of the roses that managed to survive had lost their identification, so it has been a long process to figure out what they are - a process that is still going on to some extent. It must be a wonderful place to visit.

the Director told me they have yearly meetings where European Rosarian come in to discuss roses under question in the different classes..they take a couple each year..this time it was Noisettes and I think Bourbons. The Goverment provided some money about 3 years ago to do DNA testing and they were able to test about 500 Roses-that information will be in their Rosenverzeichnis-which is the official list -starting next year as they digest the information. That is going to be fascinating.

patricia