Triple, I planted Marmalade Skies today. I did a great job, if I do say so myself! Funny how careful I am with the first few bare root plantings. Perfect weather and soil. It should be overcast and drizzle/rain this week. Tonight I went nuts and ordered the following Buck roses: Quietness Folksinger, Hawkeye Belle Mountain Music Prairie Star Prairie Sunrise I still have these coming... Lady Emma Hamilton Just Joey Pat Austin Brother Cadfael French Lace Enchanted Evening Sally Holmes Climber Happy Chappy rose in hanging basket Happy Spring!

I personally have at about 5000ft elev in SW Montana: 1)William Baffin - reachingabout 10' now after 10 years, up and over an archway, with Clematis "Bluebird" threatening to take it over each summer! Low care, rarely dead to cut out, no spray, annual feeding of composted manure and annual Bayer Tree and Shrub application. 2) Adelaide Hoodless: Never much die back but i cut it back pretty hard becasue it is a flopper otherwise - 3-4 ft H & W, a nice recurrent red. 3) Champlain: Took them all out last year - one of the prettiest hardy everblooming reds but two years of dieback followed by recurrent bouts of powdery mildew means they can't stay in my postage stamp size of a garden... 4) Flower Girl: a floribunda with minimal dieback and pretty clusters of baby pink single flowers. to 2 ft. No disease issues. 5) David Austin's Gertrude Jeckyll: Dies back some years but rebounds well to 3-3.5ft and the fragrance from these large mauve blossoms is out of this world!!!! 6) Rosa glauca - red leaf rose to 8 ft H That foliage, those hips!!!! 7) Austrian Copper - a bugger with black spot but needed the orange in that spot - it will go when I expand the grape arbor! 8) John Franklin - a lovely red with the sweetest form in bud and flower, nice clean foliage and overall shape. I don't grow any of the rugosa hybrids that have the matte foliage such as hansa and Belle Poitevin - the flowers are gorgeous but they are particularly resentful of our alkaline soils, even with heavy ammending. That is my current inventory but I have grown others in this area: a quick list...Bonica - lt pink,Graham Thomas - a DA yellow, Henry Kelsey - red climber, Knock out - red, any of the Morden series, Winnipeg Parks - rosy pink with good foliage, Therese Bugnet - nice pink but sometime chlorotic... Looking to try Starry Night as I don't currently have a white and maybe add another DA or 2! happy rose growing to all!

I just got back from Niagara Parks Botanical Garden (Canada), there aren't lot of roses in bloom, and they have very bad midge damage. I love that rose garden deeply, but many their rose beds have been replaced with annual flower beds, it's very sad to see less roses everytime I visit there, all the excitement just suddenly lost in the empty air......some old ramblers have some pretty buds on them, I hope I can go back there next weekend. Rugosa roses in the parking lot are beautiful, for some reason there is no rose midge damage on rugosas. They don't use chemicals in Ont Canada, I hope somehow in someway they can keep the rose midge under control. Walking in their beautiful rose garden filled with colors and fragrance became a misty dream from far away.......

HI folks Sorry I've been off posting since last fall - I've missed you all. Partly I've been online so incredibly long hours teaching (university) that I haven't been able to stand being online any more than I have to be. Also, I had a devastating garden-wide bout with Rose Rosette Disease last fall and had to take out about 20 roses and prune ABSOLUTELY everything else to the ground to hope to avoid catastrophic rose disaster. I'll post separately about that, maybe this weekend. Suffice to say for 1000 roses several of which were 12' tall and 10 years old (owning their own dumpsters) this was an exhausting and demoralizing fall. To respond to folks in warmer zones that just got that bizarre freeze all the way to Texas, it doesn't hurt to wait a bit to prune. Dead canes don't cause the rose problems any more than long fingernails cause you problems beyond inconvenience, though if there is downy mildew spotting it's probably good to prune sooner than later. I try to wait till the rose starts leafing out and you can see what is alive at that point. Seil, no I'm not remotely pruning at this point - the post is several years old and was from mid to late March. We're still recovering from the snowiest January ever and one of the coldest Februaries ever. Thank heavens it was in that order! Under the snow it's always 32 degrees however cold the air gets, and we had easily two feet of snow (16" in one snowfall) protecting everything. It's just now starting to melt with temps this week into the 40's all week, but it'll be a long time till I'm out in the garden. Great tips about not pruning once-bloomers Seil. Fortunately those are among the roses that don't take any pruning at all and I almost never see winter damage. Occasionally I'll see a once bloomer shed a cane for some reason, but that can be pruned out after the spring bloom to avoid disrupting the other canes. For the first year ever since growing roses, i have absolutely no rose pruning to do this spring. Everything was pruned to the ground so it's a matter of seeing what resprouts from the ground, and anxiously checking for any signs of RRD and ruthlessly digging out. No second chances or wimping out. Glad this post is helpful! Cynthia