Oh my, sorry to hear about the ankle. Ouch! I live in zone 5 in Omaha, NE, but I grew up in NW Iowa. I am guessing you have rich black dirt. I was so surprised moving to NE to learn that not everyone has that pretty dirt...lots of clay in the soil here & it is orange/brown. What part of NW IA are you in? I grow Distant Drums, had 2 but lost one over the winter a few years back. I think it may be one that isn't as hardy. I also have Country Dancer. It has thrived and is about 4 foot wide and 3 foot tall right now...It is about 8-9 years old. Most of my roses are grafted and I plant the graft deeply (got that great advice here). I have around 75-80 roses. I usually lose about one a year, though this year we had such a mild winter, they all did very well. I don't do a lot to winter protect with so many roses. I generally let the oak leaves blow around them & call it good. Of course I will baby a few of my absolute favorites! But if you only have a few, I would mound up dirt around the base in the fall.

Thank you all for sharing your experiences with Buck roses and enticing me to other varieties. You, evil rose people, you! I am very pleased to hear about PS. As I mentioned, it was an impulse buy and never thought about it or never paid any attention to it. I was so fascinated with the large 4 inch bloom with intoxicatingly sweet fragrance. The bush was in a 2 gallon container and about 1 ft tall. When I go back to the nursery and see the roses, I have a better idea about how they are. My garden contains some Buck roses also - Carefree Beauty, Earth Song, Aunt Honey, and Blue Skies. All the roses are indeed carefree except BS. BS had very strong citrus fragrance and acted like HT, but he decided to not grow.

I've had the general impression that my Kansas roses (Zone 6) have had more BS problems than usual. I only grow one Buck rose--Earth Song--it is usually very disease-resistant, but its leaves has been having a slightly sickly look with some blackspot--lots of yellow leaves falling off and the new growth definitely was not vigorous or even as green as it should be--until just the past couple days. I'm thinking the earlier rainless weeks were harder on the roses than I realized. For the past week we have had rain nearly every night --the soft slow rains that plants love--and Earth Song and other roses have suddenly perked up and begun putting out much better looking foliage. I did spray about a week ago, so that may also have caused improvement. I haven't really studied any of this closely, but I have been thinking that a number of the roses are experiencing more BS and yellowed leaves and undercolored, smaller-sized new leaves--but some of the roses have shared none of those symptoms. If nothing else, it is good to hear that I am not the only one wondering if something more is going on this year or not. I'm thinking now I should have been doing a lot more watering about a month ago. Kate

I have about 25 Buck roses at the moment, and a good 10 of them stand out so far as having a notable presence for me. Quite a few of them are too new to be blooming much and some have not been hardy for me, which is surprising because they were bred next door in Iowa. I'll show my favorites and comment on some of the others. I agree that Folksinger is awesome, even if the blooms to fade to cream once the summer sun gets hot. It can be a lovely soft apricot color, and it reliably bushes out well. It also survives and blooms well in my zone 4 pocket, which has only the tough survivors. Prairie Sunrise is another keeper that is usually a little more reliably apricot. It also blooms in part shade in my zone 4 pocket on the north side of my house, and it's a good bushy rebloomer. Not quite as enthusiastic a rebloom as Folksinger, but more intriguing color variations like the vivid color in the photo below. Prairie Sunset is nice but doesn't bloom as often and tends more toward hot pink with a little coral tinge. It's also not quite as double as Prairie Sunrise To round out the Prairie series of very hardy Bucks, Prairie Princess is almost always cane hardy and it is huge, flopping over a 5' fence like you can see in the photo below. Mine isn't quite a once bloomer since I get sporadic blooms a little in June and July, but the main flush is at the end of May for me. I don't find it makes as much of a statement as I'd like, since the bloom is spread out over the large bush. Still, it's a nice back of the border bush. I should try pruning it back hard after bloom and seeing if it would come back stronger like Variegata di Bologna. It's a fairly generic pink bloom that's only semidouble, so it's in the profusion of bloom that it has its impact. Of course Earth Song is fabulous when it has surviving cane, and it usually has at least some, but it doesn't come back quickly from being pruned to the ground (and mine is about 8 years old). The blooms can be huge and a vivid hot pink, and it's among the larger Buck roses at 5-6' feet. I agree that Honeysweet is a way underappreciated Buck rose and it's highly variable and intriguing in color. Not a ton of blooms at any given time - not more than 3-4 blooms at a time on a modest bush, but I find it is eyecatching in the color and presence. It's pretty hardy for me and stays compact. When it fades it gets a more generic pale pink, but the flowers tend to be huge. Winter Sunset makes a nice counterpart near Honeysweet, and it is also nicely changeable in color. It can be gold, blush apricot, coral, or pinkish, though rarely as vivid as Honeysweet can get. Here is is in an apricot sherbet mood. Paloma Blanca is a very nice double white that is also mostly cane hardy in my zone 4 pocket. It can put out nice bushy clusters and repeats reasonably well, though the edges crisp like a lot of whites do in the summer. It's one of my more reliable fully double white roses. It is definitely a pure icy white rather than mucky cream. Another that doesn't get much appreciation is Pearlie Mae. Mine chugged along for about 6 years in my zone 4 pocket, but it struggled to come back quickly enough after the winters and really prefers to be a zone 5 or better rose. The colors can be terrific with those dark reverse colors that Bucks can get. I also like that it's named for Minnie Pearl. Barn Dance has been pretty reasonably hardy in my zone 4 pocket and it's a general hot pink bloom. Not a bloom to set my heart pitter patter, but anything that will survive and bloom well in zone 4 gets a positive vote from me. I also love the color variations of Dorcas and Freckles, and both have been pretty hardy for me (Freckles even to zone 4), though I lost Dorcas through gardener error and am replacing her this year. My roses look pretty much like Beth's (well, not as good a photo as hers but that goes without saying). I wish all those lovely stippled Buck roses were hardier for me, or had more surviving cane from the winter. Several of them I've had to move into a protected zone, and the following have failed at least once to survive a zone 5 winter, though they seem to be OK this year: Gee Whiz, Malaguena, Spanish Rhapsody, and September Song. Sadly, Incredible doesn't seem to be hardy, but I'm going to try a really protected spot. I haven't been able to overwinter on several tries the following Buck roses, some of whom I've tried in zone 6 spots: El Catala, Calico Gal, Iobelle. Several weren't hardy in a standard zone 5 spot but might be OK in my protected zone 6 areas: Golden Princess, Enchanted Autumn, Serendipity, Sevilliana, Musicale, Allamande Ho, Gee Whiz. I can attest that the following Bucks aren't hardy to zone 4, but I am trying them again in a more normal zone 5 spot: Aunt Honey, Frontier Twirl, Hawkeye Belle, Mary Susan, September Song, Prairie Star, Cinnamon Spice. Country Dancer survived several years in part sun but finally faded and I haven't been excited enough about it to replace it yet - in that location it was a sparse bloomer, but it's probably not the rose's fault. Prairie Breeze didn't come back from one winter, but given the part sun spot it was in I'm not prepared to say it's not hardy for me yet in a normal reasonably sunny spot. The only Buck that I actually dislike is Mountain Music. I expected to like it from the hmf photos, but mine was a monster gangly bush that barely bloomed once in prime location with scruffy barely semidouble blooms. It was reasonably hardy, so I dug it up and moved it to a tough part shade spot where other roses wouldn't grow, so it won't bug me there. It didn't quite get shovel pruned, but it definitely got demoted. No clues about fragrance on any of these, being sadly deficient in the schnozz department myself, but I would grow Bucks for the color and bushiness rather than the scent anyway. Cynthia