Thank you all for sharing your experiences with Buck roses and enticing me to other varieties. You, evil rose people, you! I am very pleased to hear about PS. As I mentioned, it was an impulse buy and never thought about it or never paid any attention to it. I was so fascinated with the large 4 inch bloom with intoxicatingly sweet fragrance. The bush was in a 2 gallon container and about 1 ft tall. When I go back to the nursery and see the roses, I have a better idea about how they are. My garden contains some Buck roses also - Carefree Beauty, Earth Song, Aunt Honey, and Blue Skies. All the roses are indeed carefree except BS. BS had very strong citrus fragrance and acted like HT, but he decided to not grow.

If you bend any cane on any rose past horizontal, more buds along the cane will grow and produce flowers. I imagine any other training would just depend on what shape pleases you.

I have a couple volunteers showing up in my yard that at least I know aren't Rosa multiflora. I've been eagerly awaiting for them to flower so I have a better chance of telling what they are. I'm linking to an article at a site you might enjoy since the writer sounds like she's into these and knowledgeable too. I do like native roses, but have much more to learn about them. -- Lori Here is a link that might be useful: The Native Roses of North America at wildlifegardeners.org

Hi, Malorena, Yes, I remember the TV series. The show was in it's first run when I was a kid in the 70s, and it made the books popular, so they were hard to get from the school library since all the kids wanted them. But I eventually read them all. Did your husband know that the actress who played Nelly, Alison Arngrim, has written a memoir, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch? I read it a few years ago. It's full of interesting information about the show. I do remember hearing or maybe reading something about Michael Landon being angry over the show's sudden cancellation, and he wrote the story line for the townspeople to blow up the town so that the studio wouldn't be able to use the sets for anything else. I never saw the pilot episode, but I can tell from your description that they drew from the family's experiences in Kansas for that storyline, and since you're interested in the Native American angle...... This takes place in the book titled Little House on the Prairie and it's the only one in which they have significant contact with Native Americans. In that one, the Ingalls settle on reservation land in Kansas, about 15 miles west of Independence. The land belonged to the Native Americans, so any whites living there were technically squatting, but European settlers were encouraged to move there because of stories they'd heard about the American government being in negotiations with Native Americans to buy the land from them, which the government would then sell at cost to the settlers, or make it available through the Homestead Act. In the end, the Native Americans sold the land to the railroad companies instead. The Ingalls and all the others like them who couldn't afford the railroad's prices for the land had to leave. It's interesting that the show turned this into a boundary issue because I read that there is some question about whether or not Charles Ingalls knew he was on Native American land or not, but most people think that he had to have known. Even in the book, they call the area "Indian Territory." I became interested in the books and the history of the family again by reading another memoir by someone who revisited the books as an adult, and it made me curious as to how I'd react to them, reading them again all grown up, after so many years. It's called The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure. The writer also traveled to all the known Ingalls sites. I'm finding the whole thing so fascinating all over again. There are so many angles: the difference between the books and the tv show (a lot), the difference between the books and reality (not much), the collaboration between Laura and her daughter Rose in writing the books, it goes on and on. But when I came to the Roses part, I felt like I had to post it. :-)