My Blue lakes were planted the Fri. before Easter. I needed a taller trellis since they have outgrown it! They attached to the rope trellis when they first started running. I leaned my rake against the trellis the other day and forgot to put it up. I went out 2 days later and had to unwind the beans wrapping around it! I'm going by the big box store to pick up some 2x2x8's on my way home. I'm going to use wire ties and tie them to the T-posts so that I can extend them. Might not be as pretty, but hopefully it will work. Note to self, buy longer T-posts for next year!

You can grow what you like in this zone. New Dawn might repeat better. If repeat is not a problem, Veilchenblau, Seven Sisters, Climbing Cecile Brunner are great choices. Peggy Martin is a really hardy choice. Banksias and Fortuniana are great ramblers. Even Mutabilis will climb in Louisiana. Someone in Baton Rouge even has a Belle Portugaise growing on their house. RRD is not a serious problem for Old Garden Roses in Louisiana. Most of ours come from smaller nurseries Like Antique Rose Emporium and Chamblee's who use good growing practices. RRD is more a problem with roses from the Big Guys out West. Blackspot is the big killer out here. Many nurseries in Louisiana are switching to buying local or growing thier own stock because of disease problems.

"..... 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.

Here's my rule for growing climbers. do NOT prune the first three years. That includes pruning to encourage vertical growth. You may prune branches that are a hazard to navigation but that's it. That's my rule. Roses are grown to produce flowers. I have never ever removed flower buds to increase growth. I have never ever noticed that my roses are stunted by not removing flower buds. You may have a root sucker instead of a long climbing cane, if these are grafted plants. Yes it will stop growing in length once it sets flower buds but will continue when you deadhead off the old flowers. There's no intrinsic reason to limit the number of flowering canes. Only space limitations. Zig zagging the canes may help produce more flowers, depending. The most flowering shoots come off horizontal growth. So it will depend on how horizontal you got it while zig zagging. Vertical trellises are always problematic with climbing roses - not enough space to get the canes horizontal. The blackening and withering at the tips can be a number of things. Heat damage, cold damage, drought damage, rose midge. If those new long canes are not root suckers, what you want to do is wait til late summer when they just start to turn woody, and train them then. they're too soft in spring, and too woody in winter. They will put out flowering shoots next year. No, last year's canes do not suddenly take off and shoot up 15 ft. although they may continue to put out new growth over the course of a few years, but the dramatic shooting up you're looking for is done by new canes all at once, or not at all. Like you've seen. The one that did not shoot out long canes is right on schedule. Give it another couple years to get its roots established, then stand back!