My indoor desert rose just started doing this this week also, havent changed a thing: water only when completly dry, use a chopstick to see if its damp, AC daytime 75 and night 73, indoors w/southern exposure now (afternoon sun) this was the only new move I did thinking maybe it needs more sunlight. Since i had it in low light before but not sure why my leaves are doing the same as yours? Hope someone answers and for potting mix I use the gritty mix. which calls for more frequent watering than normal but I normally only water 1x or every other week now. I guess I should go back to watering it 1x a month? When I was doing this the leaves didn't change yellow or start to brown on the edges.

There are a number of reasons why people plant the pots. 1. It's a good way to winter a potted rose. The ground does provide good insulation. 2. It's a protection against voles or moles or whatever from eating the root ball. 3, You can temporarily plant the pot to see if the rose will grow in that spot, i.e. enough sun. There are probably other reasons as well but you get the idea. However, I don't think it would aid in drainage for you. Even though the potting soil will drain better where will the water drain to? It will stay in that heavy clay soil against the pot and not drain away freely as it needs to. Eventually the pot will fill up and be too wet for the rose anyway. I have lake bed clay soil as well and it is a problem but I just dig big, deep holes and hope for the best. I usually know right away if it's not working and there's too much water by the rose's behavior. Then I dig it out and try again. I did do some deep roto-tilling on the new bed we made and that seemed to help a lot with breaking up that layer of clay. The soil beneath it wasn't nearly as dense and with the clay broken it drains pretty well now.

Right now it's mostly done to give commercial growers more crops sooner resulting in more income. If you can get three crops in six years from a plot of land as against two crops, which would you prefer? Another reason for grafting (budding) is you get more bushes from a cane from budding that you'd get from the same cane from cuttings. At the base of each leaf is a small bud. Each bud can be a new rose bush when budded onto a root stock. A healthy cane containing 12 leaves (a leaf is composed of 3 to 7 or more leaflets) can produce 12 rose bushes while the cane, divided into cuttings will produce three if all take. A cutting takes three years to produce a bush the size of a two year old grafted plant. The easily rooted rootstock cuttings are placed in the field as soon as a mature crop of rosebushes is harvested in the fall/early winter. By spring these are rooted and the buds harvested from the canes of mother bushes are budded (grafted) onto them. They are allowed to grow for a year, then harvested and sold. Budded rose bushes, otherwise known as bare root roses, can be easily stored in refrigerated warehouses for 6 months and can be inexpensively shipped to home gardeners or commercial growers for resale as blooming potted roses. They'll produce a full sized blooming rosebush the first season. Cuttings can take from 4 to 12 weeks to root. Once rooted they must be moved to a larger pot which makes them more labor intensive. Sold as newly rooted cuttings,(bands), they can take two or more years in the garden to reach the size of a budded rose. If raised to near full size, shipping costs can be more than the bush as they're usually shipped in the pot. Dirt costs a lot to ship. One cane = 12 bushes vs one cane = 3 bushes. Easy storage and shipping vs costly shipping and no storage. Which would you choose? Growing potted plants must be sold soon or they lose their flowers and must be stored until thy rebloom. Most home gardeners buy the flower, not the variety like rose enthusiasts do. It boils down to economics with grafted roses for the big growers or ease of starting just a few roses from cuttings for the home gardener. For us at home, it's not the money. We can babysit and wait for a plant to grow. This is an over simplified explanation as there is more involved with either method, but I think you get the idea?

They sometimes sell them here, at our version of home depot around Valentines day (red and white - Iceberg and Europeana according to the tag). I saw some outside the supermarket for xmas just last month. They were labelled "red and white rose" with no further information, and looked rather sad and unhappy. Speaking of the citrus grafts- I was in the market for a lemon and a lime tree, and was rather interested in a double grafted one, as I dont have much room. The nursery man actually steered me away from them for the exact reason roseseek mentioned-he explained that for pretty much the same price I could get two good trees, (the double grafted ones were that much more expensive) without the risk of the stronger graft taking over. He seemed to consider the whole thing more of a gimmick than anything else, and just had a few around because of customer request.