It is so much fun when Forum friends come up to visit. For some reason, Mary's Teasing Georgia was the Austin that gave me confidence I could grow them, and now many of them do well for me. It is a beautiful rose, and people walk over to the end of the high school building just to look at it. I started taking care of our roses in March of 2004, and started gardening (redesigning and reconfiguring areas etc) that November. It's amazing to see how the plants mature and what happens. This spring flush is something unbelievable...and each year seems to get better and better. Each year I try to have a theme. This year, it's "Feed the Roses". I am trying to do something nice for them once every month.

The rosy morning was great! The judge, Rose Enders, was from the Grand Rapids area, and for this show, she focused on education. She shared her expertise patiently while she judged: what a quality display looks like, the importance of knowing what a certain variety's "best" effort would look like (she said that some varieties you have to grow to know), and how to diagnose certain types of insect damage (thrips, Japanese Beetles, leaf cutter bees...) and more. Her pace was just right -- there was plenty of time for questions, and she gave lots of examples. Time flew by -- how could it not with good company and lots of roses, roses, and more roses!

This is an interesting conversation. I have to withdraw, after looking it up, Coraebus rubi as the cane girdler pest that infests my garden. Mine looks and acts like the cane girdler described in this thread. I don't have Rugosas in the garden as they don't do well in my conditions. Roses with a good deal of Multiflora in them seem to be susceptible to cane girdler. This group, which includes the Multiflora ramblers and the Hybrid Musks, have shortlived canes that are susceptible to sunburn and cane girdler. Which factors influence the others I can't say, but I find I need to stay ahead on pruning with these roses, cutting out old canes at the base to encourage the growth of new ones. Hybrid Musks will deteriorate down to nothing if I don't do this. This thread has encouraged me to begin collecting and burning swollen parts of canes after pruning them out, so, thanks to Henry Kuska especially, for the information on life cycle and control of the pest! I've been out recently working in that part of the garden where I have the bulk of my Multifloras, and it's discouraging, and motivating to attack the cane girdler. But perhaps I can discourage them. And the area and its roses do look better after cleanup, and perhaps it's not wholly desperate to think it may turn into a decent garden one day.

Sheila, I think one of the major differences between my garden and the one at Wooster was that when my spring starts, it progresses rapidly into summer. (Last year a local friend bought twenty roses and planted them in mid April and they didn't grow very much. Reason: allow a week or two for the roses to grow out into 'real dirt' and THEN the rose puts on growth. Except last spring we barely had five weeks of optimum temperatures. It was either very wet and no sun or too darned hot. ) The crop farmers felt it as well. I would expect you are far enough north to have several months before 'summer warmth' hits like a sledge hammer. The moss roses up in Ohio had huge bouquets of mixtures of buds and blooms and not all maturing at once. When one had three blooms, you could see several spent blooms, and about twelve more buds in different stages of maturity. My growing conditions don't make for a long spring and early summer bloom for once blooming OGRs. It just doesn't happen. Heat and sunlight happen and I learned that if I don't / didn't photograph them at the start of their bloom,. the next week the bloom would be over. In your part of the world, rose buds don't mature too fast, they get large. And the blooms get large as well. In Maine we saw a rose (once bloomer) and the bloom was five inches across. (The tight petaled white one with the distinctive green pip at the center.) I grew that rose and had never had a bloom more than three inches wide and my petals never reached the size of theirs). I do look forward to hearing about your mosses, I'd expect by year two, they will be magnificent. Ann