"you could get a bad plant from so many vendors, but once I get an obvious yellow zig-zag one, I don't trust the vendor anymore." Ahh yes, the "baby and the bathwater" approach to buying roses. Unless you know for a fact that a particular rose you are buying has never, ever been grafted onto a different rootstock, then you have no guarantee that its not infected with one or more viruses. A second reasonably trustworthy scenario is if the nursery is grafting onto certified virus free rootstock and they have certified the scion variety is virus free as well. (aka VID) If you are prepared to abandon a supplier because it sold you one virused rose, then you can't trust any of them. Believe me, every rose nursery has some virused plants in their collection and they probably don't even know, since so often they show no signs of the disease! How can you fault them for that??? Many experienced rose growers prefer to ask the nurseries they buy from about the rose's provenance and whether or not the nursery knows the infection status of that variety. Most suppliers have a pretty good idea what's what. Lastly, I'll say this again: any rose that has ever been budded to a foreign rootstock is at risk of being infected with virus. That's a lot of roses, by my count.

Thanks, but Forest Farm is dead to me. They've sent me too many mislabeled species roses. I have a new objective for species roses: they should be true to type and, ideally, seed grown so that if we buy two plants, they won't be clones. I'm sick of species selections grown as clones. With unrelated seedlings, if we carefully hybridize the two plants, we can actually produce seedlings showing a bit of the diversity of the species. I've love to have a garden full of species that aren't clones. OP species seedlings are always a crapshoot, and OP seedlings of a solitary diploid species rose are virtually assured to be hybrids because so many diploid are self-incompatible.

Varieties: Gaye Hammond, Easy Does It, Wedding Bells, Plum Perfect, Poseidon, Winter Sun, Beverly, Koko Loco, Desmond Tutu, Savannah The red ones are obviously Desmond tutu, the big huge yellow ones that are blooming like crazy I believe are Gaye Hammond, the other yellow is winter sun, the light pink one is savannah. and the darker pink is wedding bells. The orange one is easy does it. Carefree beauty and shreveport are our controls. Carefree beauty is there basically to record blackspot pressure, which with no humidity and hot temperatures all summer, has been largely negligible, but will be interesting how that changes this year as we move into fall.

Herman, thanks for the update. It’s great to see fruit already. How large are the Conestoga 026 Segentrange and Poncirus Plus fruit? They look similar to PT…….or are they larger…….photos can be hard to judge. Great to hear 5* Citrumelo has some sweetness. Fruit ripens around Thanksgiving……but the size is clearly larger than PT…….a nice selection. Getting fruit in 3 years is very fast. I gave my brother who lives in Fairfax, VA a seed grown Citrumelo 12 years ago and it still hasn’t bloomed! Keep the updates coming.