I have Bermuda Catherine Mermet which is thought to be Rubens and the blooms look very much the same. Rubens can get really big, as in ten feet tall and wide. Alas Rubens/BCM is quite a tender tea. MIne is really big because it is planted a foot from the foundation on the south side of the house. A second bush planted out away from the house near the front sidewalk could barely reach two feet tall, it kept getting cut back by spring frosts. Ribens/BCM tends to try to start growing very early. Masha, your pictures are so beautiful thank you so much for posting them. Lance

The closer ones' garden is to a large body of water, in the East Bay the more the conditions favor powdery mildew. I suggest you avoid these 3 roses, they defoliated from in my garden from p.m.. -Ducher, Duchess de Brabant. "Le Pactole". and Luanne gave away "Alliance Franco-Russe" for all the powdery mildew it was covered with. Healthy roses for growing in the S.F. East Bay (west of the Caldicott where conditions favor p.m. and b.s. in warmer weeks of the year, include: "Anna Olivier" a fragrant apricot blend with pink hues. Tea is my favorite rose class and this is on my fave top 12 list. A mature plant is only c. 5 miles from the coastline and never gets sprayed and its healthy with gorgeous apricot-pink, fragrant roses. These are healthy in our organic rose garden with only Cornell. "Westside Road Cream Tea" far superior in disease resistance than "Ducher" where conditions favor P.M Etoille de Lyon Mutabilis will get p.m. but not enough to defoliate or reduce bloom production. These Pernetiana roses do well with only Cornell. Gruss an Coberg, Mari Dot, Soleil d'Or" In general I suggest you mostly chose roses with 5 -35 petals, because they will open in our cooler summers, if you have a warm sunny spot in your garden than perhaps up to 40 petals. I suggest you avoid roses such as and including "Souvenir de la Malmaison, they won't open and you'll be disapointed. "Sombreuil" the Bourbon-Tea does open and is healthy. Noisettes: Nastarana" avoid unless you care to spray it every other month. Blush Noisette" healthy but I think there are prettier roses in this class including La Nymph and Catos' Cluster which has very beautiful foliage, soft and abundant. Champneys Pink Cluster" healthy and has started blooming in March! thats a bit early for this class. "Lamarque" very healthy. "Reve d'Or" locally quite a bit more resistant to disease than "Mme. Alfred Carriere, though the later catches up (almost) eventually, as a mature plant. Crepescule" gets more p.m. (and a bit of blackspot) as Reve d'Or, though Crepescule can be grown no spray here as well, Hybrid Musk roses grow well here, I've grown 14 different H.M.s and never had problems with any. H.P.s: Mrs. John Laing, also you might ask Luanne to post here, as well, as she lives in Richmond, near the Bay. She is a heck of a nice lady and grows beautiful roses including many Austins and some H.T.s. Luxrosa

Like most folks on this thread, I'll have to echo that teas (something separate from Hybrid Teas of course) don't necessarily thrive the further you get from zone 7. It's like anything else - you have to pick and choose among teas, and even then it may depend on local conditions like catsrose says from zone 6. I have had Madame Alfred Carriere for many years, and have planted some other noisettes or tea-noisettes recently (Blush Noisette comes to mind), and so far they've survived fine but are not cane hardy. The problem is that these seem to only bloom on old wood, so while MAC has absolutely massive healthy canes trying to eat my house every year, I've only had one year of bloom out of them in the past 6 years (a very mild winter where most roses had surviving cane). The same goes for many of my Bourbons and Hybrid Perpetuals, including Mme. Isaac Periere. As for teas, I've got some 6-7 year old ones that do fine for me and a few new ones planted. Some teas have died a miserable death (Monsieur Tillier comes to mind) and all of these are in a virtual zone 6 side of my house. The longest surviving ones are Mme. Antoine Mari, Mrs. BR Cant, Maman Cochet, and Duchesse de Brabant. Georgetown Tea was also good until it succumbed to user error. I wouldn't say any of these thrive in the ways expected for warm zone teas, but they make nice modest sized blooming bushes and recover reasonably well from being pruned to the ground even after all the protection I can give them. Bottom line is that zones 7 and to some extent 6 are probably the limits of where teas are likely to survive long-term, but they do need summer heat (we have plenty of that), rather than murky summer gloom like some regions can experience. I'm a bit of an anomaly in zone 5 and I'm fully aware that I'm zone pushing the teas. Nothing like a challenge though. Cynthia

I'm in NJ, technically zone 7a but the last two Winters were harsh. Here, the few Teas and Chinas I planted in the ground are great. They do get cut back hard by Winter, but Summers here give them what they need to rebound and grow like gangbusters. When my "hardier" roses take a nap during the hottest part of Summer, my Chinas and Teas are in their glory. "Bermuda Spice" was NEVER without at least a few blooms since it started in late May -- there are even about 30 or so on it now, after the first freeze last night. Mine also don't seem to be bothered at all by the prevalent blackspot, but a few did get touches of mildew when the weather started turning cold in Autumn. Frankly, if I had to choose between mildew and blackspot, I'd rather have mildew. If it bothers me enough to do something about it, a quick spray with the Cornell mixture clears it up right away. Blackspot is not so easy to handle without fungicides. As to why breeders don't introduce more of them, I think there are a few reasons. One is that there are already so many to choose from, and those who choose them tend to be "off the beaten track" as far as rose growers go. That and their limited cold hardiness -- as well as their potential sizes -- put a cap on their potential market in the US. But I do think that as gardeners in appropriate areas continue to seek healthy, easy-care "landscaping" roses as opposed to finicky roses whose presence is endured for the sake of their florist-quality blooms, the usefulness of the Teas will be rediscovered. If you want that to happen faster, talk about them with your gardening neighbors to spread the word. :-) ~Christopher