Iowa is not the best either. I think we have every rose enemy, blackspot, powdery mildew, RRD, occasional spider mites, Japanese Beetles, crown gall, I am sure others too. Gardeners seem to admire someone who can grow clean looking roses, because most people can't do it. So if you are looking for a challenging environment, try Iowa. My parents are now in Arizona, and in the spring time their roses look great, and are tall with lots of flowers, and no diseases. They have a drip system for watering. My sister in Colorado Springs probably has an almost ideal environment. It is not humid. The summers are not as warm. They do not have disease issues like we do here. They might have critter issues, esp. deer. But you need to water, and she doesn't, and the roses I have seen there in mid-summer are disease free, and flower free. Regular watering would turn that around.

Robert, Oh, I cannot believe you have one. You have EVERYTHING there! I saw a photo once of a trifoliate orange fence. They planted those killer trees about two feet from one another, and every year, using chain saws and, I assume, wearing suits of armor, they cut them back almost to bare trunks....you know, I think the term would be that the trees were pollarded. It made an incredibly dense fence that absolutely nothing could penetrate. Personally, I wouldn't plant that kind of fence, but if I had a neighbor like Ezzirah's, I might be tempted to do so. Ezzirah, A neighbor like that would drive me insane. Actually, we had a neighbor like that in Fort Worth, except the trees weren't actually anything they planted....they were hackberry trees that had grown up near the fence line in their yard many years earlier when it was her mother's house. It was an older neighborhood (the neighborhood in which I had grown up) and the trees were very tall and had grown right through the chain link fence so the fence was embedded inside the trees. First we put up a wooden privacy fence, so we didn't have to look at the tree trunks with the fence right in the middle of them. Then, whenever the trees came over the privacy fence, I pruned the limbs back, and I pruned them up as high as I could reach with a pole pruner to give us more sun. Did she like it? No, but she didn't like anyone or anything, so it was just one more thing to make her unhappy. Some people are determined to be 'difficult' and it sounds like you may have that kind of neighbor, which is just so unfortunate. I feel like we're pretty lucky. We're in our early 50s now, and that really was the only truly unpleasant neighbor we've ever had. All the neighbors we have here in our little rural community are WONDERFUL and I am so thankful that we have kind, gracious, friendly, loving neighbors. It makes life so much more pleasant. Remember the old saying "Good fences make good neighbors." Good luck with the neighbor/fence/tree issue. I suspect it may cause you some frustration. Dawn

Oh, yeah, anthropogenic climate change is definitely real. There's no doubt about it. Heat records are being broken far more often and by much wider margins than cold records, and we're seeing more and more record-breaking floods in already-rainy areas and record-breaking droughts in already-dry areas (which is to be expected because hotter air evaporates more water). Also, average temperatures in most of Tennessee have risen a few degrees in the past decade alone (1991-2020 vs. 1981-2010 NOAA climate data); average precipitation risen a few inches equally rapidly, too. I find it more likely that the destruction of wild palm populations was due to urban sprawl, irresponsible agriculture and rampant fire suppression. (Dwarf and saw palmettos actually thrive in fire-stricken pine savannas.) We've seen this with longleaf pines, too. The construction of reservoirs can't have helped, either; most subtropical North American palms actually thrive in poorly-draining soil, contrary to stereotypes about palms needing well-drained sandy soil. Besides, the wild dwarf palmettos in Cherokee County, AL and Hardin County, TN were seemingly unknown prior to the 21st century and are still little-known; if they could survive the severe volcanic winters in 1783-84 (which caused ice floes off of the Louisiana coast and a frozen Mississippi River in New Orleans) and 1816 (which caused deadly June and August frosts at least as far south as East Tennessee), surely the ones in the Deep South would've been unfazed by a volcanic winter in the Little Ice Age too! My guess as to what happened at Cape Hatteras is maybe a severe Category 5 hurricane snapped or washed away all of the cabbage palmettos (and the land they grew on); it's more hurricane-prone than anywhere other than Florida and parts of the Gulf Coast due to its extremely exposed location right by the Gulf Stream. With the Cuban royal palms in Central Florida, I'd guess that the Little Ice Age did them in (probably same for the Spanish moss in colonial-era Maryland), whereas other palm species were able to adapt to the centuries of a slightly cooler climate; some things are just down to chance. As for the Brazoria palmettos in Texas, I seriously doubt that those are cabbage palmettos. It's more likely that they're an ancient hybrid between dwarf and cabbage palmettos that migrated westwards. Maybe they could also be a more evolved subspecies of the dwarf palmetto than the Louisiana palmetto is. They're too cold-hardy to be pure cabbage palmettos, and them being a hybrid of the dwarf and Mexican palmettos has been ruled out. P.S.: There were no glaciers in Virginia in the Quaternary Ice Age as far as I know. The only Quaternary glaciations that I know of in the South were an alpine glacier on Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina and the southern edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet covering modern-day Louisville, KY. Even the majority of Missouri, parts of Southern Illinois and most of West Virginia and the coastal mid-Atlantic escaped glaciation during every Quaternary glacial period; anywhere that was once covered in alpine glaciers would have cirques, while the LIS destroyed bedrock in old hills and left behind glacial till on top of whatever was left.

Can I talk about Rosa 'Munstead Wood? Cultivated in a garden in zone 9b (winters with little intense and little persistent frost between -1º / -5ºC and very hot summers, with temperatures around 32 / 35ºC and even some days reaching almost 40ºC) I cultivate two specimens of this variety in my garden. Both are grafted. In my garden is very refloreciente. The roses are beautiful and have a strong aroma. However, I must emphasize his propensity for powdery mildew. Just formed the buds at the beginning of spring quickly appears the terrible white powder on them. It is true that then, in summer, when the temperatures rise a lot, the disease low in intensity and practically disappears. I do not apply chemicals. Sometimes I make a mixture of potassium soap with water or I make a tea of nettles. How much color is very changeable. The spring bloom is so dark. The typical dark purple color appears in autumn bloom. It is a rose-bush with many thorns. The leaves are beautiful when they are born. With a very beautiful dark border !! It is very refloreciente. The flowering continues well into the autumn. It is also true that little resemble the roses of spring and those of autumn. The roses that sprout in autumn are less full of petals and somewhat smaller. The color, as I say, much more obscure than those of spring. I write a blog about my garden and you can read if you are interested in many comments on the behavior of this rose in my climate. This is the link: Rosa 'Munstead Wood'