Probably better to plant your roses in the fall. I doubt if you can even get them unles they are growing in pots now. However, here are my favorite cutting roses. Top of the list would be red Veteren's Honor which holds up for the longest time and Fame which is a bright raspberry. The English roses don't hold up long enough for customers except those who love ENglish roses and will put up with 3or 4 days of life just for their glories...I have one customer like that. I think it is either Tuscan SUn or About Face that also is a lovely cut flower. Mine are new bushes so I haven't had many and they sold so fast I couldn't check on how they held up! I like some of the floribundas too like Honey Perfume and Daybreak, Roses that will NOT hold up are Sunsprite and Joseph's coat. I have many other roses but thEse are the ones I think of right off. Oh, another favorite is the (white) Mt Hood, (Pink) Great Century. Aperitiff seems to be doing well for a yellow rose and for Peachy tones I like Sunset Celebration and Apricot nectar.
Valencia is a gorgeous pale orange.Some of my customers love Hot Cocoa (I do too!) My favorite of all is Mother's Rose from J and P. For me, these all hold up about equally in my no spray Pacific Northwest garden. Yes, they get black spot but they leaf out again and keep on going.

Oh yes, Love and Peace is a beauty also!

Valerie,

(Really, I DID, TRY to make this response short. Alas......)

If you haven't been to the rose forums, hie thyself over there, post haste. Maybe also to the NC forum, if there is one.

Ashdown Roses is in your part of the world --well, semi-close. They're in Campobello, SC. They have a luscious catalog & website, and specialize in antiques, hybrid teas, many others, including lots of very fragrant ones. The owner and his staff are very friendly & helpful and I'm sure would respond well to emails or actual phone calls. They can give you advice on best varieties for cuts, which are the most disease resistant, etc.

Generally speaking, I've had to forego many antiques (went through that phase of being ONLY an antique rose aficianado---aka "snob"! LOL!), and am gravitating more towards hybrid teas. Antiques & David Austins have that lush look many of us adore, but the petal substance on many of those isn't strong enough to last on the walk from bush to house. Again, that's a general statement that certainly doesn't apply to ALL Antiques or David Austins. (I've heard that David Austin has developed a new line of "cuttable roses", and that they should be available in the US, MAYBE this year, 05, or next, or by 07. LONNNNG wait, but worth it, I'm sure. Ashdown & Chamblee's may be the primary vendor's for those cuttable David Austins. Ask.)

I've had very good luck w/ New Dawn, climber, lots of thorns, very little spraying needed, if any. Pretty heavy spring bloom, very scant re-bloom. Also love my Mrs. B. R. Cant, a tea (predecessor class of the Hybrid Teas). She has gorgeous mauve-pink blooms, gets big and sprawly 8'x8', again, very little if any spraying. Semi-thorny. I'm falling in love w/ my David Austin Graham Thomas, beautiful yellow blooms in spring, not much repeat.

All of these (and many other roses), may take up to 3 years in your garden to become their "best", but you should have some roses each year.

A must have you should probably get is Belinda's Dream. Technically NOT an antique, but classed with them for some reason. It's on the list of Earth Kind Roses Dr. Steve George of Texas A & M Extention Offices has researched. His "Earth Kind" roses aren't IMMUNE to diseases and pests, but get so little that they might as well be, or what little disease they get they bounce right back from. Anyway, Belinda's Dream gets big also, say, 6' x 6', lots of BIG fragrant pink blooms. Last well on bush & vase. If it can handle Texas' heat & humidity, it should do well in NC.

Ashdown has several roses on my big wish list; you could/should also check w/ the Antique Rose Emporium in Brenham, TX, The David Austin websites, and Chamblee's Roses in Tyler, Texas. Other wishlist rose catalog companies are Heirloom Roses in Oregon?, Arena Roses in Ca or Oregon, (somewhere on the West Coast), and The Uncommon Rose, also out of the West Coast. Edmund's is also good,(west coast again!) but they cater primarily to Hybrid Tea lovers, and those who exhibit those hybrid teas. Not a fault, just not the Antiques or Austins. Heirloom and The Uncommon Rose both send small, own-root roses in what they call "tree bands". Good, rooted roses, just small. You'll have to pot them up in a gallon container for a year or so before they can go in the garden. I've ordered from The Uncommon Rose, but not from Heirloom. Heirloom has one of those luscious catalogs too! Edmund's & David Austin & Arena send primarily bare-roots; Ashdown, Chamblee's, and The Antique Rose Emporium will send usually own-root one or two gallon roses. Chamblee's is close, so I usually drive down there; I've ordered from The Antique Rose Emporium and got GREAT packaging, and, I've been to their store in San Antonio. Both good experiences. Haven't yet ordered from Ashdowns, but am longing too; haven't ordered from Arena in a few years, but got good service when I did. Carlton's is a good source for florist/show quality roses, and they also send small roses, some VERY small, but low price. Johnny Becnel (sp?) is a florist/show rose vendor, but I'm not sure how to get hold of him. Think he's in Louisiana. I haven't ordered from Carlton's or Becnel, but they too, will one day be on my lists!

A couple of years ago I was trying to tell a knowledgeable rosarian at a Dallas nursery that I wanted to grow my roses organically; he may be more pro synthetic chemicals in general, and/or, he just had good advice: "You can grow them any way you want to for your own use, but if you are growing them as a crop, for bouquets, as a BUSINESS (!!!), you MUST spray, so your flowers will be perfect!"

That was somewhat eye-opening to me. Reassuring? Practical? some of all. Not long after that, I DID start doing some black spot and/or powdery mildew sprayings, and as I did, I came across my New Dawn and Mrs. B. R. Cant who did not need ANY spray at all, thank you very much!

I'm very irregular w/ any spray program (organic or synthetic), and even forget to fertilize the poor things often enough. Still, most of mine survive. I have an outbreak of Whiteflies this summer, and they've hit some of the roses and other plants fairly hard, plus, I'm in the beginning-middle stages of the annual grasshopper invasion, so I've been spraying w/ one of the Bayer products the last few days. The whiteflies have had plenty of time to build up numbers enough to be somewhat of a damaging threat, and no friendly organic natural predators are in the vicinity, so synthetic chemical spraying I do.

OF course I've gone way too long. The key word I'm looking for in flower catalog copy nowadays is "incredible petal substance" , and/ or, "great on the show bench" whether it's for a rose/tulip/daffodil or other flower. I've found that that "petal substance/show bench" phrasology rings true w/ daffs and some of my roses. The thinner petalled cousins are still pretty, but may be too fragile for bouquet work.

Don't forget, there ARE a lot of Hybrid Tea roses that DO have good fragrance in them. For a long while, fragrance was bred out of hybrid teas, but in recent decades the hybridizers are putting it back in. However, one of the women on the rose forums specifically raises the hybrid tea roses used by florists; she has a list of at least a 100 that she grows. She swears that the ones w/ fragrance have the shortest vase life. The ones w/ NO fragrance have the longest vase life. Something to do w/ the genetics, and maybe pollination. Once the flower attracts a bee by fragrance, the flower declines. I think her name is Deborah, she was in NC I think but has recently moved to Texas. Check for her name on the general (main) rose forum page of threads, then email her privately. She probably could give you a LOT of good info. Also, someone is always generating a question: "Which roses (hybrid teas, antiques, David Austins, etc) are best for vase life?" so you might find some of those questions fairly current.

Enjoy your journey into rose catalogs! Even the poor ones are good, and the ones w/ knock-your-socks-off photography will make you swoon!

Susi.

PS: Of the three or four roses I mentioned, I like Mrs. B. R. Cant the best for buds & blooms. New Dawn has pretty blooms, but they shatter quickly (makes a GREAT "magazine cover rose" in bloom tho! LOL!), and my Belinda's Dream isn't old/big enough to give me consistant blooms. Graham Thomas does well, I think, but this was his 2nd year of starting to be great (#4 in the ground? can't remember), and his blooms may have happened when I didn't have use for yellow roses, or didn't have a customer, or whatever. Smells divine! You should also try to get Valencia, from Arena Roses. It's a great beautiful butterscotch/yellow hybrid tea rose. A co-worker of my daughter's raises a LOT of roses, and had provided each person in the office w/ home bouquets of Valencia the day I visited. It's gorgeous! Fragrance wasn't strong that day, but the roses were starting to fade.

One more bit of advice: I'm learning this from my iris buying spree(s): if you have space and money, get your roses (or iris, daffs, lilies, etc) in 3's or more. Three of each variety you "must have". The David Austin people used to recommend buying & planting their roses in 3 of a kind. For the longest time "we all" thought that that was "just" a marketing ploy for them. Well, it is! But, it's also helpful for the cut flower grower to have 3 rose bushes producing multitudes of flowers, instead of one rose bush (or iris plant, or whatever!). Might be a "duh", but it took "me" a LONG while to figure out!

NOW I'm done!

I agree about getting great roses in 3's and like Susi it took me a while to get to this. But 3 Veteran's Honor, while lovely do not a whole bouquet make if you are doing larger arangements. You can feature them mixed with other things but how much better to have as many as you want of them at once...or suppose you are doing a wedding for a friend...Nice to be able to carry out a theme with the same rose.

Hi, Valerie.

Whew! Susi's epistle contains much good info. Roses have a learning curve. Like Susi, I started out trying to choose 'antique' roses because it was the PC way to try & avoid using chemicals. Gradually, tho, I learned that while many are good for a large landscape, they aren't that good for cutting or bouquets, and I've shovel pruned several charmers. This was partly due to flopsy-ness, & a lot because of the limited color range of the oldies.

I'm having a hard time imagining growing roses for selling without being willing to spray. There are very good, tho expensive, spray products now available which are quite less toxic and used in tiny quantities per gallon--Banner Max, Compass, Manzate. If you use Manzate at the beginning of the season, just after pruning, and then alternate use of the other 2 every 3 weeks or so, you should have no problem. And, all the scary stuff you hear about killing earthworms, bees & butterflys is nonsense.

After 5 years dealing with roses, I've settled into a mix of using lots of good compost & organic soil-enriching stuff, and chemicals judiciously as needed. When I developed an infestation of rose weevils a couple of years ago, I was forced to use a Bayer 3-in-one product, with guilt & conflict. But I had too much invested to just let them all get eaten into swiss cheese flowers. The problem is that once you're 'into it' & have put much $ and BST in, if something comes up which threatens your roses, most organic approaches are at best, partially successful. You need to know this going in. Disease 'resistant' doesn't mean 'disease free in each & every case'.

As for particular roses, I'll defer to Susi & others on the Roses Forum [her advice to search that forum for 'vase life' is a good one]....Except for a few notes: If I were you, I'd give serious thought to what colors I wanted to use in my bouquets, & choose roses which fit in with that color scheme. My colors are riotously complementary: oranges, bright pinks, purples, cooled off with fillers, often chartreuse. Since it's easy to get purple in other flowers, many of my roses tend to be in the orangy-bright pink range. If you like intense colors, a few to consider which mix well are:

1. Yves Piaget: gorgeous form, intoxicating scent, great vase life. Bright pink.

2. Pensioner's Voice: an orangey blend which looks different at different times of year, but always 'wow'. If cut just as buds are opening, vase life is good.

3. The Impressionist. From Heirloom. Could be my favorite rose of all. Less intense color, but a gorgeous orangey-pink blend which smells good, has the old rose flavor, but good vase life.

When you buy 'own root' roses as from Heirloom, here's a tip: Plant them in 8" fiber pots which can later be planted in the ground as-is. I have found own-root roses to be more disease resistant than bareroots, in general, tho not in every case.

Some helpful links:

Rose File: has photos of many roses, so when folk mention them to you, you can go there & look at them.
http://www.rosefile.com/RosePages/GetPhotoFind.html

Every Rose: also a resource for looking up roses. Has comments from those who grow the rose.
http://www.everyrose.com/everyrose/index.lasso

There's another link I can give you if you email me privately.

Hope this helps.

Karen

My garden has about 25 roses. I plant mostly for fragrance, I am a fragrance nut. What many posters here have stated regarding the lasting qualities of Austins and other "old garden type" roses is sadly true: they don;t last real long on the plant or in a vase. Plus they don't have the longish stems that gives you more arranging options, they tend to be shrubbier.

The rose in my garden that last long, both on plant or in vase, have swell fragrance and nice long legs for cutting are as follows: New Zealand (pinkish blend), Just Joey (pale apricot with ruffly edge but not quite long legs), Fragrant Plum (mauve), Mr. Lincoln (a red classic), Full Sail (white but not quite long legs either) and About Face (sort of orangey edged with red). About Face in particular astounded me with its lasting-ness.

I can't comment about blackspot or mildews since I have thankfully not encountered either on the above roses.

Hi all,

So sorry to start a thread and then vanish! I've had a week off from work (whee!) and took a pottery course at the nearby John C. Campbell Folk School (whew!). Classes were s'posed to run from 9 am to 4 pm, but we had a very dedicated instructor, and went to 8-9 pm almost every night--good for learning, but I came home and COLLAPSED every night.

Lots of good advice from each of you. I don't want to suggest I have to be 100% organic--I just prefer it. I'll definately explore Ashdown Roses, Susi. A regional supplier will surely understand my climate issues. The idea of (3) plants each is also a great tip.

I'll look up each of the plants you guys recommend, and discuss them with Ashdown.

Thanks again, for taking the time to share your favs, and your experiences.

Valerie