It is a beautiful rose flower and so is its sport, Pink Intuition. I find the Delbard striped Garden Roses to be very healthy. We've had them here going on four years now and I've seen them in gardens all over Europe. Regarding spraying RI regularly. Yes, when we released them as exhibition roses that is exactly what we meant. They can be grown if you are willing to put in the extra time as opposed to a garden rose. We just wanted to be upfront with the customer. Our natural rose care line is designed to build the health of the plant and it should work fine for you. Regarding availability. We have licensed only two nurseries to carry the roses. Wisconsin Roses on multiflora and Johnny Becnel Show Roses on fortuniana. Part of the reason we have plants here is to increase the supply of budwood to them so they can fulfill back orders so fingers crossed you will get one soon!

When you planted it, did you thoroughly tease out the root ball and double dig the hole around it, amending the soil, making sure drainage underneath was good? If you didn't, the original container soil will allow water to drain rapidly to the bottom of the root ball, and accumulate until it gradually seeps into the surrounding soil which is very bad, gradually killing the tree. This a very common mistake in horticulture. Give her a good foliar feeding to green her up in the meantime, and dig down carefully and take a peak to see what the problem is.

I hope that you won't mind if I disagree with you. I'm healthy, too, but I'm sure there are lots of fungus, bacteria and who knows what else living all over my body. Hydrangeas are well known to be susceptible to fungus and powdery mildew. Powdery mildew is quite easily seen and you'll see it forming in late summer and, for me, by this time of year, I see all sorts of signs of powdery mildew on much of my hydrangeas. I imagine it's the peak of the season for fungus. I think I can see signs of powdery mildew in lerissa's pictures. It's the white dusty look on the leaves, especially visible in the bottom picture in the middle of the right edge. And I think that the blackness that you can see in some of the first pictures leaves could be a fungus, too. Fungus comes on strong in the late summer and that's just when the flowers start to show these spots. Look closely at some of these spots. Don't they just look like leaf spot to you? If I look really closely, I can see some of the interior of these spots actually turning brown. For me it looks like the more powdery mildew on the plant, the more speckled is the flower. It's across varieties, too. The plant on top is a Nikko or All Summer Beauty that's got it's share of powdery mildew. The plant on the bottom is Endless Summer that shows very litte signs of any fungus of any kind. There is still some spots on the Endless Summer flowers, but hardly noticable. Within Nikkos that I have, this difference shows up, but Endless Summer was so much more disease and spot free. I have some Preziosa and they got the most spots very early and they were also the ones that got the most powdery mildew very early. At this point, the plants are completely covered with mildew and the flowers are pretty much brown. Hay.

I got Dolly Parton this spring. It's been OK but I'm not thrilled with it. It doesn't have the form I was expecting. Usually the centers are really messed up and it could use a few more petals too. It blows rather fast so it would be hard to get to a show. It also black spots quite a bit.