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.

Prairie Star and Prairie Harvest are disease free (as foliage goes) here in coastal NC but one of them balled terribly when we got a sudden rain (sorry, don't remember which one). It is possible that it was not the rain but very dry winds or sudden thrips attack - in any case from a moment to another it turned to an ugly brown paper ball. Winter sunset as Michael mentioned last longer as cut flower than on the bush; it is very beautiful when it starts opening but blows fast on the bush if bloom left there. Maybe in a colder climate it would last longer. Here in the south, I am told, Earth song, a grandiflora, is one of the best and the most productive - healthy, has a gazillion of flowers, gives good and fragrant cut flowers and holds on to its flowers on the bush as well. It does not mean though that it will behave the same way in Iowa. I love, love, love Quietness; it is pale pink. Simply gorgeous and smells very good. My smaller plants already gave me so many flowers that it was just amazing. Huge, many petaled blooms, supposedly good for cutting, too. I have Prairie sunrise. It was my first Buck rose, is a small rose even after 5 or 6 years. It is still under 3 or 3 and 1/2'. Not very productive in my opinion and here it gets blackspot. Too bad because I planted in a bed where I do not spray any other rose so this rose does not get sprayed either. Very beautiful though, I love the colors. And maybe in your climate it stays clean. (But, let me emphasize again, it is my smallest Buck rose.) PH or PS close to it has clean foliage and on the other side Quietness is also clean. Folksinger is a good repeater and it is apricot (my favorite color) , has clean foliage but the flowers blow fast but repeats fast. Many people love Golden Unicorn, I have one in pot but not in the ground; relatively new acquisition from Chamlee's. Have no personal experience of Hawkeye Belle; my understanding is that it performs better in cooler climate. Here is an extensive list and description of almost all Buck roses from Iowa STATE University. The photos, alas, are not very good. http://www.ag.iastate.edu/centers/cad/where.html The next website for the best source for best priced, strongest own root Buck roses. Here is a link that might be useful: Chamlee's

Well, today I dug up 2 Prairie Sunsets, 2 Breathless, Tiffany, 2 Gruss an Aachen (they were damaged by the ice storm), Abe Darby, and Joseph's Coat. Most of them are badly damaged by the black spot, and the canes were no longer healthy. Rina Hugo seems fine. Arethusa is beautiful, as are Square Dancer and Splendora. I am going to put Arethusa and Natchitoches Noisette in the front by Marie Van Houtte and Spice. Opposite them will be Splendora and Square Dancer. Once we get these out, we are going to expand the dogs' yard. I have needed to reduce my garden for years, and this is a good way to do it -- to give part of it to the dogs. Sammy

First off your roses look beautiful! So you must be doing it right. I don't recommend covering them. Covers, in my opinion, just ask for things to mold inside. In particular in the spring when the weather fluctuates so much and it's usually rainy. The roses get damp and the temps go up and, bingo, you've got mold in there because the covering holds the moisture in so the roses can't dry off. Just a good thick layer of mulch at the base should be enough. Even with coverings you're going to get winter die back. It can't be helped. But by leaving the canes open to the air they'll be able to fight off fungus and mold better. Good air circulation around and through your roses is important year round to keep diseases at bay. As far as fertilizing and dead heading, if you're using a fast acting water soluble fertilizer like Miracle Grow you can continue to fertilize them. You don't want to put down a heavy dose of organics or any kind of slow release fertilizer though. And go ahead and deadhead right up until they go dormant. I assure you that even if you stopped doing so in August they wouldn't go dormant. The roses will continue to grow and bloom until the first hard freeze anyway. As long as the weather is good and there is sufficient daylight they'll grow. Yes, you may lose some of that new growth over the winter but I feel it's more important that they go into winter healthy and growing than half starved and covered in hips that they're trying to ripen but never will. Something I think is important too is water. We sometimes slack off on watering in the fall but that can be a big mistake. The roses need to be well hydrated going into winter. So if the weather is good keep watering them right up to the time you put them to bed. And don't rush into doing that too soon. You have to wait for Mother Nature to make the first move and she doesn't always read the dates on the calendar. Wait until you've had several hard frosts and the ground is beginning to freeze before you do any winter protection. Putting winter mulch on too early can cause several types of problems from inviting critters to nest in it (and munch on them all winter like the rabbits did to mine one year) to cases of rose canker or gall. I used to put mine down around Halloween. Then it moved back to right around Thanksgiving. Now I'm not doing it until the first week of December. The weather has been changing and has pushed back my winterizing time significantly. And that last question is easy to answer. I used to beat myself up about those huge, bloomiforous bushes too. Why don't mine look like that? Until I finally realized that a lot of those gorgeous pictures you see are from wonderful rose growers who live in WARM climates! Their growing season is much longer than ours, some of them year round, and they don't suffer winter cane die back every year. The roses get much bigger and fuller and bloom more. But they have their down times too. Not from cold but from heat! A lot of the really warm climate growers have no roses in June/July/ August (when our roses are at their best) because it's too scorching hot and the roses shut down and go dormant then. But their plants do always get taller, bushier and have abundant blooms when the weather is good. The biggest advice I can give you is relax! Enjoy your roses and don't fret so much about them. You'll be surprised how resilient and forgiving they are. Besides being gorgeous!