well, I suppose if rust is not a problem.....not that I can recommend any as this is one class of roses I do not grow (apart from S.du Dr.J which is NOT my best performer).

Ooops, sorry, Deuil de Dr. Reynaud is a Bourbon, not a HP.

Melissa, I think many of us in Mediterranean climates tend to concentrate on the teas and chinas, since these usually have a more graceful growth habit and don't need as much water and fertilizer. I understand that HP's are heavy feeders and like quite a bit of water. I did grow Frau Karl Druschki in another garden and it did reasonably well, no disease but also not a lot of rebloom. I hope others will have more useful suggestions.

Ingrid

In my California garden--probably similar to your climate, although a bit cooler/damper as it's only a few miles from the Pacific--Baronne Prevost, Grandmother's Hat, and Barbara's Pasture Rose have all done extremely well, despite periods of terrible neglect. (They were buried under an enormous, fallen MAC for over a year--I thought they'd been killed but, when I was able to get in and clean up the Madame, I found them green and alive. After a few weeks of nothing more therapeutic than sun and water, I found a bloom.) The fragrance is wonderful.

Hope you post more pix of your garden soon.

Colleen

Melissa, my experience with HPs has been they prefer less of the "Mediterranean heat" and aridity. Milder temps and higher ground water levels suit them much better. Very large, very full flowers require a lot of water to create, as does the traditional "Dr. Huey" type growth many of them love to run to in overly long, warm climates. Other than Grandmother's Hat, presuming she even IS an HP and not an early HT or even a weird Bourbon, I haven't grown any HPs which didn't have more than their share of fungal issues in the kind of climate you grow roses in. Grandmother's Hat is the only one I maintain in my current climate and she requires nothing other than water, sun and room.

The class was superb in Britain's cooler, wetter climate with the high sulfur air quality of Edwardian and Victorian times. I think you'll find the best reports about most of them are going to come from climates more closely resembling the cooler, wetter areas, rather than hotter and drier types. Kim

well, they weren't THAT superb, at least not ever as good garden plants. For sure, if you want some huge blowsy buttonhole or a vase of flowers, but honestly, even in an english climate (and to be fair, East Anglia is a bit dry), they are just not really worth the fuss and bother unless you have heaps of time to fuss and faff, loads of space (they are big and sprawly, even though they might get mean with blooms), ugly leaves, nasty diseases.....(not holding back, here). A class of roses which have, like all those national trust mansions and all that, HAD THEIR DAY - just not really relevant to how we live now.
I was being a bit polite in my first post, but having thought a bit harder.....course, you do like these big flowery ones, dontcha, Melissa, so it might (just) be worth it to at least have a tryout (and if you have a nice bit of dapply sunlight, you could do worse than try the good Doctor)

Hi Melissa!

My garden is also in a mediterranean climate and hybrid perpetuals are wonderful here. I can add to the recommendations for Baronne Prevost. I grow her up in the hills north of my house in a wildland setting next to a seasonal spring-fed stream which goes dry for months in the summer, so she goes without water during that time. This year, for instance, we had very little rainfall, and the stream went dry unusually early, by May, and I've given no supplemental water. BP has turned out to be one of my most floriferous (for most of the year) and most drought tolerant of roses. I never fertilize her either. The roses in that location are on their own. Fragrance is excellent. Beautiful clean foliage too. This is a rose I wouldn't want to be without. I also have grown her seedling Caroline de Sansal which I planted on a very hot western-exposure wall in full sun. She was similarly superb as her parent, but with pale pink flowers. I sold that property with the rose so no longer have her (but she's on my wishlist!). I gave a Caroline de Sansal as a gift to a friend who lives in nearby Glendora, CA (same city of Portland from Glendora fame) and she is beautiful there too.

I saw both Baronne Prevost and Caroline de Sansal in the fabulous hybrid perpetual garden at Eurodesert Roses last year. Both confirmed my high opinions of them and yet Eurodesert is really and truly located in a desert climate and so much hotter and drier than a mediterranean one. And still the hybrid perpetuals were gorgeous and brimming with health AND flowers! Yes, there are some naysayers, but fortunately rosarians such as Cliff Orent quietly accomplished what some continue to say is a waste of time--to grow hybrid perpetuals very successfully in southern California. The soil at Eurodesert is very sandy which isn't what I think you have, but the heat of summer is much more intense I would think and a tougher test to pass. So I might suggest that you do a Garden search on HMF for cliff (and select Cliff's High Desert Garden), then do an advanced search by class for hybrid perpetuals. Check out his list and maybe contact Cliff Orent and ask him to recommend which of the hybrid perpetuals were the easiest to grow in his extreme conditions.

Now I bought a number of the Eurodesert hybrid perpetual mother plants last year and planted them in my yard. They've been excellent here too in zone 9b. My soil isn't quite as sandy as Eurodeserts but it is still on the sandy side yet with plenty of rocks and the addition of loam. From among these purchases some of the standouts have been Francois Premier (very fragrant, many petalled red flowers and clean, clean foliage, grows in an upright vase shape, of moderate height), Comtesse O'Gorman (also very fragrant and
healthy, red flowers look like peonies, grows in a low to moderate mounding shape, will tip-root), Henry Nevard (a classic!), Sydonie (fits among the hp's although not technically classed as one, is wonderful here and elsewhere all over CA where I've seen her), Abbe Brameral (produces long-lasting flowers of a gorgeous purple shade which my camera simply can't capture, started blooming here in January even when the canes hadn't begun to leaf out, but flowers are only moderately fragrant, gets a small amount of rust here), not Symphony (CO purchased it as Symphony but what came wasn't, however it is a beauty with extremely fragrant long-lasting pink flowers, darker in center, very narrow and rigid upright growth with some canes smooth, others with many small prickles, excellent clean foliage). None of these are water hogs and are doing wonderfully on only infrequent light feedings of fish emulsion. I have also a smaller plant, that came last fall as a band, of Directeur Alphand which is also performing well. Flowers are a lovely distinctive shade of mauvey brownish red. Very fragrant. I haven't seen a full size specimen though because Eurodesert's mother plant was already sold and gone by the time of my first visit. Mine is happily ensconced between Rosa webbiana and Rosa primula. It needs no more water or food than these lovely species.

I grow many of my hybrid perpetuals in groupings with species roses and California native plants (which often don't like too much water or rich feedings), so the ones I grow need to be compatible with these native plants and not fussy like some other classes of roses which are dismal performers in this area being generally water guzzlers and food hogs. Here these are headed by teas and chinas which tend to either look terrible most months of the year covered in disease, don't grow at all, or outright die. I also found these two classes to be considerably the worst looking of all at Eurodesert last year. The teas won that crown, with the chinas only faring a bit better. Since this mirrored the experiences in my garden as well as what I have observed over the years at the nearby Huntington, I find these classes quite unsatisfactory in my area.

Melissa

Hi Melissa -
I'm in southern California just a couple miles in from the ocean - it's a mild Mediterranean climate with ocean breezes most of the time. Probably not as consistently hot as your microclimate, tho. Marchessa Boccella has been growing here for over 10 years - she's a beauty. I grew Yolanda d'Aragon for many years, but after a beautiful spring bloom, as the heat increased over summer, she always mildewed and defoliated - I finally shovelpruned her. Now I'm growing Grandmother's Hat - it's still small but very clean foliage. I used to have Reines des VIolettes which bloomed well and even got beautiful lavendar tones in our soil, which seems to be rare. But it too struggled with hotter drier conditions of late summer and always got ugly, so it's gone, too. I grew Glendora, too - healthy and floriferous, but a towering massive shrub! Sydonie supposedly can be grown well in California, so perhaps where you are, too? It's lovely and graceful with smaller very fragrant flowers. I'm going to try it again one day.

Hi Melissa! I don't know that much about the HPs, although we have a lot of them in the Sacramento Cemetery Garden. I know that when they bloom, I fall completely in love!! However, the first year I worked in the Rose Garden, the rust on some of them was terrible. And yet, last year and this year there has not been much at all. Anyway, I know that I can say (like everybody else) that Grandmother's Hat always looks wonderful. As to the others, tomorrow is my day to work at the Garden, and I'll ask some of the really knowledgeable people there if they can recommend a few.

Laura
P.S. How is my beloved Mme. Antoine Mari doing?

My, my, what an interesting set of responses! Especially California Melissa's. What she says reinforces suspicions I've been nourishing, that some of the healthier HPs might do well for me. I have a couple of Mosses that look like HP relatives that are thriving. It's also true that my Teas and Chinas almost all struggle out in the open garden. My good plants in these classes are all in partial shade in sites protected from wind, in terraced beds with better drainage than our clay offers. I'm working to add subshrubs and shrubs, and, practically, anything that will grow, to the open garden, and also to terrace the ground at least a little. But several years of trying to grow Teas and Chinas in the big garden have been largely unsuccessful, while the once-blooming old roses have done moderately well--some, very well indeed.
Growing conditions are a complex matter. "...my experience with HPs has been they prefer less of the ..Mediterranean heat... and aridity. Milder temps and higher ground water levels suit them much better." I don't doubt what Kim says. But we average 40" rainfall a year, spread out mostly from fall to spring, and I think ground water levels are usually high, judging by how very few of my unwatered roses I lose to drought. We do have high daytime temperatures in summer. But the temperature drops at night, which I understand is an important consideration; and much of the year temperatures are cool to chilly. Most years we light our first fire in the wood stove during a cold spell in September, and continue to have fires in the morning into May. About the heavy feeding, I have always had the impression that our clay soil needed mainly organic amendment to be abundantly fertile; certainly we don't need to worry about sandy, rocky, or shallow soils in most of the garden, and those roses that are happy, are very happy indeed with minimum intervention.
Suzy, Steve, Ingrid, Colleen, Kim, Melissa, mudbird, Laura, I appreciate your comments! Laura, 'Mme. Antoine Mari' is doing splendidly. I didn't prune her this spring, as I wasn't sure how much damage the very cold weather of February had caused (none, as it turned out), and she is now 7' x 7' and has bloomed all summer through an unusually dry year. It is actually, blessedly raining now, and so we have a chance at a good fall flowering, such as hasn't happened for the last few years.
Suspected HPs in the garden (these arrived without names and I made guesses):
'Ulrich Brunner Fils'
'General Jaqueminot'
'Gruss an Teplitz'
None of these is doing well, but they're planted in a bed that ALL the roses hate.
HPs or similar planted last fall, mostly:
'Jacques Cartier'/'Marchesa Boccella'
'Reine des Violettes'
'Enfant de France'
'Reynolds Hole' (as it probably is: I received it under the name 'Mrs. Reynolds Hole', a Tea, which this is not)
'Yolande d'Aragon', a puny plant that I was surprised to find still alive when I got back from Florida, but it is.
These are all young plants, but they all survived the summer, and perhaps in a year or two they'll begin to show what they can do. 'Reynolds Hole' has been in the garden a few years and is doing very well.
Melissa

To contrast our climates, Melissa, we usually receive nearly 15" of rain annually. It was about 8" this last year. We've had an unusually humid summer, an anomaly for us as it's usually rather arid during summer. Temps have been a bit higher than normal, mid nineties to low hundreds and it has remained significantly warmer at night than the "norm". That means, and I know I'm going to get NO sympathy from many as it's still cooler than most, the nights in the 60s have been more in the low 70s.

Winters are usually down to the low 40s, with the rare dip into the mid 30s. This past winter was mainly very warm and dry, instead of chillier and rainy.

Your list performed here like this...

'Ulrich Brunner Fils' - ran to rampant growth, rust and black spot.

'General Jaqueminot' - black spot but grew OK, flowers fried.

'Gruss an Teplitz' - grows OK, flowers OK.

'Jacques Cartier'/'Marchesa Boccella' - jealthy, flowers like a floribunda.

'Reine des Violettes' - HATED the alkalinity, many years was once flowering. When it did flower, they fried in very short time.

'Enfant de France' - mildew, but grew and flowered.

'Yolande d'Aragon', - lanky and rangy, chlorosis issues, but flowered.

Kim

Good morning Melissa;
A few years ago we visited cousins in Southern Germany. One of them had a beautiful red climbing rose bush. Which Gretel told me grew with almost no care in her brown thumb garden. I emailed her for you.
The rose bush is cl albert la blotais. It is a cross between HP and Tea. She tells me that the bush is available in commerce.
I suspect that her garden is some cooler than yours; but other than that she also is not able to water and only fertilizes once in the spring.
Hope that helps.
Jeannie

Melissa, I asked Anita this morning about your question, and she said she thought your climate would likely be very much like ours here in Sacramento, CA. Also she mentioned several: the ubiquitous Grandmother's Hat, Forest Ranch Pompom (luscious), and Benny Lopez (also wonderful). I know of these because I have done deadheading on them and thought they were lovely (and healthy!). She mentioned something about a European source for these - at least I think she did (my hearing is pretty bad), but I'll ask her again and post if I find out about that.
Glad to know your Mme. Antoine Mari is doing well - I remember how lovely it looked on that series of photos on your Italian rose forum.

Laura

maybe Bierkreek - I have ordered from them because of their listings and because they use canina rootstock (and they are lovely people to deal with).

Jeannie, Laura, Suzy, thanks for the information; Laura, your feedback is especially interesting. I hear good things about Bierkreek. Kim, in the first part of your post I believe you make my point! that our climate is milder and wetter than yours, and perhaps offers Hybrid Perpetuals the conditions they need to do well.
I read that this summer was the second hottest here since 1800 (the hottest was in 2003: we were here for it as well), so I guess it's not too surprising that the garden looks awful. Most plants lived, rather to my surprise, and especially the roses hung on with great determination. As I clean up dead weeds and pull up Bermuda grass the overall picture improves slightly, though I'm full of plans to propagate and purchase phlomis, brooms, ceanothus, ornamental sages of the S. griegii ilk, and anything else I can think of that's likely to be able to handle serious drought. This year even the rosemary and lavender looked quite dry before the rain arrived, and I'm not sure I've seen that before. And of course I'm planning on belts of trees and and shrubs, but they are so, so slow.
Our week of rain yielded about three inches of precipitation, so water's not an issue for the moment, and everything's greening up.
Melissa

HP's were bred in and for Mediterranean climates. You have a Mediterranean climate. Southern California does not, unless you look at the southern shores of the Med, where excessive heat and aridity mean you may get away with Teas and Chinas, but not much else.

HP's were - in garden terms - a disaster in Victorian gardens, in England and Northern Europe. They were grown to provide those luscious blooms for table and dress decoration - not to exhibit in gardens, but at shows.

Hmmm, I see that even for you, Kim, the ones which did OK were either not HPs or were untypical of the group (Gruss an Teplitz, Jaques Cartier). Glad to hear Jon concurs with the general disaster HPs actually were for people without a staff of hundreds and heaps of disposable income and acreage - ie. nearly everyone. However, in the south of France, they look spectacular so the choice, for you Melissa, is more which ones to try rather than whether to even bother.

A staff of about twelve would probably do for a moderately sized estate. (Mottisfont in its heyday had a garden staff of twelve for pleasure grounds of about 50 acres and productive fruit and veg gardens, quite a small property - about half that number, on a good day, during my time) Of those, a couple would be extremely skilled and the rest would be of the level that we call 'gardeners' today.

It should be remembered that it was really only the owners of reasonable properties who grew roses or gardened, not the 'nearly everyone's' of today. No little front or back gardens in the cities, suburbs hadn't been invented. The market increased with the rise of the upper-middle class, but it wasn't until the late postwar boom that gardening really became universal.

However, large rose gardens would use roses in their hundreds, if not thousands. To include a couple of favourites in your own garden is no great chore, especially if you follow the later Edwardian practice of arching the long canes down to other plants (full-scale pegging requires a lot of room) and removing the spent canes on a regular basis. That way you can have the admitted beauty of the flowers without the ugliness of the growth habit.

Non-Mediterranean gardeners can also try them in large pots. I do this with some of my favourite deepest coloured HP's, (Empereur de Maroc, Fisher Holmes, Prince Camille de Rohan) and really treat them as HT's, keeping them short by annual hard pruning and deep deadheading after the first flush and feeding and watering heavily. Again, a common practice in Edwardian days.

Best wishes
Jon

Hi Melissa,
Most of my roses are Old Garden Tea or Noisette roses, but every now and then I get a craving for the scent of a damask rose and head to the H.P. section of a catalog.

In our area of Oakland, California, the conditions are the worst for the spread of
1. powdery mildew, all through spring and much of Autumn.
2. followed by blackspot which doesn't show up until early summer when temperatures rise.

Then we have 3-4 months of drought and unless foliage is watered, foliage disease isn't much of a problem until the rains begin in Autumn, and p.m. and blackspot return.

The native soil is heavy clay.

Of all the H.p.'s I've planted in my own no-spray and public rose gardens these were the healthiest, by far.

Top 5 H.P.s for disease resistance where I live:
1. Baronne Prevost' Extraordinarily fragrant, too.
2. Mrs.John Laing'. a pretty plant, but has bare ankles which I surrounded with heritage geraniums from the 1800's and earlier.
3. Comtesse de Chabrillant' a real sweetie, bears darling smallish rounded pink roses, on a pretty plant, whicj is spreading and leafy. Very disease resistant where I live.
4. Grandmothers' Hat' grown self standing which makes it re-bloom more often, and as a climber.
also benefits from under plantings to hide bare lower canes.
5. 'Mme. Boll' the most upright of these, which is not my favorite growth habit.

I also grow 'Frau Karl Druski' because I love white roses, and she is one of the whitest rose I have ever seen, I also like her scent, light but clean and fresh smelling. Foliage is clean until it rains or I get careless and sprinkle her foliage during the few weeks it gets hot enough here for rust to show up.

I came across a 'Grandmothers Hat' that was thriving in an abandoned garden where it hadn't been watered by anyone for ten years or more. As I mentioned we get reliable summer drought for months on end. It was growing in deep shade which is probably why it survived the long droughts, and I was delighted to see pink roses near the top of an evergreen tree!!! An H.P. that can survive drought and bloom despite being surrounded by evergreen foliage, 'Grandmothers Hat' would be my top choice if I had your conditions.
Luxrosa

P.S.
These failed and were removed:
'Gruss an Teplitz' from powdery mildew.
'Monsieur Boncenne' rusted to death.

I'm far from a Mediterranean garden but in my dry climate my best HPs are Alfred Colomb and Duchesse de Rohan.I have Frau Karl Druschki too, but I cannot take to it, scentless as she is.

Lux, thanks for the feedback on the Hybrid Perpetuals in your garden, and Marianne, thanks to you too. I'm planning an order to Petrovic in Serbia, and I suspect they're oriented more to HPs that will do well in cold climates. The found roses like "Grandmother's Hat" that thrive in California aren't listed among their varieties--and they have a long list--neither under the found name nor under that of the suspected original name.
The various comments on disease people have made suggest how different our climate is from what a lot of Californians know. Rust is virtually unknown in my garden--I've seen it once in the decade I've been growing roses here--and blackspot shows up mainly at the end of the season when it starts to rain in October. We get plenty of mildew, but it falls in the nuisance category, being unsightly but not, apparently, doing much damage. I've never known a rose to defoliate from mildew--don't know whether that occurs in U.S. gardens where it's a problem.
Branching out a little from Hybrid Perpetuals, I want to mention a Bourbon that's coming along well for me: 'Variegata di Bologna'. I lost my mother plant to bad conditions, but not before I rooted a cutting, which I planted in a quiet corner of the garden and which has been quietly growing ever since. Once or twice a year I pull away the Bermuda grass that has grown up to its roots, and that's about all the care it gets. It's about three years old as I recall. Each year it produces a handful of canes that are bigger and more vigorous than those of the year before. If nothing happens to it, in a few more years it may be quite a sight. I'm not fond of Bourbons as a class, but VdB looks like it may turn out very rewarding.
Melissa

Melissa, Bierkreek have Grandmothers Hat. I know because I have just ordered it!!!!
Daisy

Thank you for that verification, Jon. Catalog writers have to move product and rose lovers frequently promote truly awful plants because of the beautiful flower. Combine the two and you can have some real issues! Of course, there may be exceptions which take to particular micro climates and culture, but isn't it more than a little unrealistic to expect something bred and selected in a climate completely different from yours, and which required a staff of professionals to provide their blooms for cut work (house, display, exhibitions) and NOT as a beautiful garden plant, to succeed when used for everything it was never supposed to be?

I'm a bit disappointed Bierkreek isn't listing Larry Daniels, Striped Grandmother's Hat and Tina Marie, the three color sports of Grandmother's Hat. They were sent in the same box as GH was. I haven't been notified they didn't propagate. Perhaps they will list them next year? If they do and if you're pleased with Grandmother's Hat, these other three can provide you with as pleasing garden specimen with varying flower colors. Kim