My Heritage has been in the ground for 13 years. It fights a lilac and the shade of a holly, but still tries.

"It has black spot." Well, there you have it. It needs a regular treatment with a fungicide. No leaves, no photosynthesis, weak plant. You can go back to the main "Roses Forum" page and search for "sulfur", you can TRY it if you want to go organic, although I am not sure how effective it will be. Otherwise, you'll need a fungicide such as Bayer Advanced Disease Control for Roses, Flowers and Shrubs or Bonide Infuse, applied regularly, starting in late winter through October.

Another place to look: "Watered with a soaker hose." How often is it watered and for how long? Roses like to be watered deeply and less frequently.

Roses live forever. Your bush is telling you that it needs help.
I can never understand why sulfur, which is a chemical, is OK for organic gardening while daconil (cleared for spraying on tomatoes before harvest) or mancozeb, is not. Beats me! Now insecticides can be very poisonous indeed but fungicides generally aren't. At least not to warm blooded items like us.

My oldest Austin, Heritage, is over 12 years old and doing amazingly well. I have had some roses, Austin & otherwise, decline each year, but it is usually due to where the rose was sited, or they had RMV that hadn't been detectable at first. When I potted up or moved the virus free roses, they often took off, although some never really recovered. I have 5 hybrid teas, John S. Armstrong, that were put in front of our home by the original owners, when it was built 35 years ago. They are big and strong and healthy and still pump out lots of lovely red roses. I know from experience that sometimes you can get a rose that's simply not a good specimen, while others of the same kind are excellent. Perhaps it's a poor graft or a weak root system, but for some reason, it fails to thrive and gets weaker each year. I bought 3 Tamoras years ago - two took right off and are lovely to this day. The third did OK the first year, and after that just went downhill.

A lot of it depends upon the exact spot where you have the rose planted.
I have five Pink Gruss an Aachen roses planted in various areas of my front, back, & side yards. All purchased from the same source. Each one of them looks a little different, depending upon how much sun light it gets in that spot, the soil and amount/quality of compost amendments in each area, and the amount of water & fertilizer each area gets.

A healthy David Austin rose might not live in my garden as long as an antique china rose would, but I think it will be long lived with proper care.

Randy

Thanks all. I have a very robust Heritage too, very near the Abraham Darby. I bought them at the same time. It's a different animal - it has the constitution of a wild rose while the Abraham Darby has the sensitive nature of a hybrid tea.
I guess I'll be getting aquainted with fungicides. Any pruning suggestions for an already wimpy looking plant? Msb

Remember, New Jersey generally has acid soil. If your AD was grafted on Dr. Huey, the root stock could be in decline. I would gradually build up the soil level to encourage the development of own roots. I would also treat the black spot.

What Harry said. Many grafted roses only have a viable "life" of 10 years. What happens is that a callus builds up over the graft and gradually over time limits the number of new canes until the rose completely stops producing them. An own root rose, if properly cared for, is virtually immortal. There are specimens of Old Garden Roses, 200 years or older, growing wild in cemetaries and neglected homesteads across the United States.

Several of mine are 10-12(or more) years.
Pauline - Vancouver Island

A few older than 30. . . .

All OGR's, Moderns and HT's grown in the UK will be grafted. There are no own root nurseries. This also applies (generally) throughout Europe. If our roses only 'had a life span of 10 years' I doubt any of us would be growing them. But perhaps Patrick meant, specifically, 'Dr Huey'?

Best wishes
Jon
(Campaign Against Old Wives Tales :)

I think he was agreeing with my point that a rose grafted on Dr. Huey rootstock does not have a great life expectancy in the eastern part of the US. This is primarily because Dr. Huey does not thrive in our acid soil.

I wouldn't prune severely this late in the season. I would try to arrest the blackspot so that the rose can store some energy to come back from the winter. Bayer Advanced Disease control applied weekly with a tank sprayer is the best way to accomplish that. Next year, every two weeks may be enough. Or you can plan to replace AD with a more resistant shrub. AD is highly susceptible to blackspot in my garden, whereas Heritage is somewhat resistant. That's probably the explanation for the difference. Plants can't grow without healthy leaves. Mosaic virus, if present, can cause the decline of older plants in zone 6. You may also be getting winter damage if the plant has been defoliated during previous seasons.

I would say everyone's advice is so good. Hard to know sometimes why a rose won't grow. If you know you have a good location, then try going on a regular spraying and feeding program and see what that will do. I had luck with removing some soil to the side of the roots and replacing the old soil with yummy new soil. I do one side of the plant one year and then another side the following year.

If that dosen't work, then look carefully for any signs of virus on the leaves in spring or if you want to relocate your rose, you can carefully dig it up in its dormant state and see if the rootstock is in decline. Sometimes you get a bad plant from the start but in this case you said it was doing well until recently. So maybe you can rejuvenate it. Putting more soil up around the base sounds great to me. Sometimes a rose will rebound once it starts sending its own roots out- especially if the soil is full of good things it likes. I wish you and your rose well.

Thanks again for your very helpful answers. I'll be printing up this page for future reference. I hadn't even thought to look at the graft. I love the AD flowers and want them back in abundance! MsB

This is off-topic, and I apologize, but, Jon, I wonder why there are no own-root nurseries in the UK? Purchasing own-root roses is very popular for many of us here, especially for us gardeners in the southern portions of the U.S. 100% of the roses in my garden were purchased growing happily on their own roots. I know there must be a good reason why people in the UK don't want roses that are growing on their own roots, I just don't know what it is.

Randy

To the best of my knowlege Randy there are no own root nurseries in Australia either.

.....and Randy to the best of mine, they are not supplied from the usual nurseries in Canada either, like Pickerings etc. I know the Old Rose Garden Nursery on Hornby Island off Vancouver Island are own root, but for most of the other roses that members talk about here, I doubt if there are suppliers for most of the roses that you talk about. I just may be very unaware. But it seems from what you guys talk about that they are the best route to go.
Pauline - Vancouver Island.

.....and Randy to the best of mine, they are not supplied from the usual nurseries in Canada either, like Pickerings etc. I know the Old Rose Garden Nursery on Hornby Island off Vancouver Island are own root, but for most of the other roses that members talk about here, I doubt if there are suppliers for most of the roses that you talk about. I just may be very unaware. But it seems from what you guys talk about that they are the best route to go.
Pauline - Vancouver Island.

.......... Wow, I thought it was impossible to post twice here!!!Sorry! :puzzled
P.

Possibily the prevalence of own root nurseries here has something to do with economics. Grafted nurseries require much larger acreage. Practically almost anyone can start an own root nursery given the need only for a greenhouse not the large fields needed by the other And it takes longer to produce a grafted rose.

I won't get into the merit of one versus the other form of propating but given the much longer history of rose growing in the UK and other places in Europe maybe they know something we don't with regard to that.

Moodyblue - it was great hearing you refer to the Old Rose Garden Nursery on Hornby Island. I remember when I visited Vancouver Island we took two ferries over to Hornby and had a great afternoon looking at their fabulous roses (the climbers took my breath away) and visiting with the owner. Thanks for the nice 'memory trip'.

As Jim says, look to economic explanations. The mass market producers in the US until quite recently were interested only in producing and promoting modern bush roses and climbers. Very small companies, motivated by love as much as anything, took up the role of propagating old roses, shrubs, and little known varieties. It takes less room and less skilled labor to produce roses from cuttings.

If it's an old wives' tale that grafted roses are short-lived, it's also false that roses generally do better grafted. Modern bush roses, perhaps so, and some other varieties, but many roses grow strongly on their own roots.

I've some grafted roses in my garden that are 50 years old. So it isn't true that they hav a limited life expectancy in the northeast.
Suspect the reason why own roots are popular in the US is that in the warmer climatic zones they do very well. Up here, they are very slow off the mark and often fail to survive the winter. I've finally decided to pot up the few own roots I purchase and keep them inside for one winter to make enough growth to survive temperatures which drop far below zero. For me, grafted roses have always done best. They produce a big bush faster and a lot more flowers the first year.

The first rose I planted , Tamora, was with the graft above ground. In Iowa is that not a good idea unless you are going to tip (bury) the plant.

There is a right way and a wrong way.

In Iowa that is the wrong way.

Foghorn Leghorn
NAGL