Funny! Folks often joke that they need to get out the shovel and show it to the rose to get it to perform. Peter Mayle and Elle are your unloved roses??! I'd welcome them with open arms! (to my pot ghetto, since I am all full --of course) i have 2 roses I was secretly wishing would die and I left them out in pots all winter unprotected. ( One was supposed to be Tamora and I am pretty sure it is an easy elegance rose, Yellow Submarine. ) They have gone on to thrive. Really just be outstanding altogether-- and so I was forced to change my opinion of them. They are outstanding roses, for the kind of rose they are. Which is still not my type and so I am still going to give them away, because I don't like roses without fragrance and my garden is too small to leave them there.. I bet you could trade those roses in a heartbeat for something you liked.

This is a fun and very enlightening discussion folks! Your story about New Dawn, Kim, seems to support the notion that the extent to which hips interfere with a rose's blooms depend on the "energy" reserves that the rose has to draw upon. Tough as nails roses like Knockout (as Michael mentioned) or the roses Jackie and Zack mentioned have such a reservoir of health and energy that hips are unlikely to affect them much in any climate unless something else interferes with their vitality. Notorious wimps like Tom Brown or Grey Pearl might be killed by one hip any time anywhere, assuming they set any in the first place. In your story of New Dawn, it sounds like the rose was able to build up a greater store of energy reserves in a climate pattern more to its liking, and therefore the hips affected it to a much lesser extent. I was wondering a related question to Michael's - is every rose hip that spontaneously appears on a bush pollinated so as to produce viable seed, and could it matter that you are deliberately trying to get your roses "pregnant" in your breeding efforts, which might take more energy for the rose than a random hip popping up here and there. I'm thinking of the analogy of chickens, and I don't know if it applies here. When chickens have a set of fertilized eggs, they shift all their energies from laying new eggs to brooding and caring for the bunch. The unfertilized eggs that we eat are expected to be "ever-blooming", however, every day or two. I imagine that you're also leaving the hips on the rose far longer than the random hips I encounter, which also makes a difference as you've already said in the recycle rate. Related to your squirrel comment, would it help to tie a netting or panty hose segment over the crosses to keep it on the bush even if the critters mess with it? Exhibitors seem to do something of the sort for show blooms. I could totally see me getting manic if a cross that I've waited years to develop got carried off by a witless tree rat that didn't really want to eat it anyway, and buried it somewhere in my neighbor's yard! Thanks for the enlightenment, everyone! Cynthia

Some roses don't have the genetic ability to root at all. Some don't root easily. Some require specific handling to successfully root. Remember J&P's "New Generation Roses"? They were their own root moderns, created to eliminate the expense of budding. They prematurely announced Henry Fonda would be available own root until they discovered it doesn't root well and doesn't make a good plant own root. Week's offers some of their roses own root. Many, though, they don't because they don't develop good enough root systems to produce the quality of plants they want to have their name on. Mermaid, per one nurseryman, won't root for him until September. Locally, I've been told not to even mess with trying Fortuniana until Mother's Day. This is going to vary depending upon the variety and location. Grey Pearl is difficult to root and makes terrible plants unless budded. Many of the Coffee Roses are that way. Some roses just don't have the genetic ability to differentiate their cambium layers and form roots well. You can continue trying it and you may hit upon the right combination to produce the plant, but then it may not grow well anyway. Personally, unless the variety has special meaning for you, I'd move on to more successful varieties and grow the difficult ones budded, or not at all. Kim

There are many rose out there that just don't have any fragrance. At the time that a lot of these roses were bred fragrance wasn't a consideration. They were breeding for that beautiful classic high centered, spiraled, hybrid tea form and not much else. Things like disease resistance, hardiness and fragrance weren't high on the priority list. More recently breeders have been trying to bring back all these qualities but it's a slow process. And you'll note that a lot of the newer HTs don't have that form but are more decorative shaped to the lament of many an exhibitor.