You're welcome! It's not odd that cooler zones will report more fragrance from many than warmer areas. Those in the cooler places are probably smelling them when the oils and alcohols are most volatile and smell the most. We in the warmer areas often miss out because they evaporate faster as the heat increases. Also, as aridity increases, the scents burn out faster. The various components of each rose's fragrance evaporate at different rates, so one may smell very Damask at first, quickly morphing into orris or citrus, finishing a completely different scent before losing any detectable trace for the day. Any user can access the Advanced Search, but Premium Membership permits you to specify multiple traits and types, where basic membership only provides Advanced Search using one criteria. Kim

I'm surprised nobody has posted on this thread for so long. Anyway, while knowing which general classes of roses are best, it's just as important to consider the specific individuals within those classes. The most successful rose I grew while in Mississippi was the Cherokee Rose (Rosa Laevigata). Second in vigor and health was the yellow Banksia. Third, I suppose, would be Rosa Fortuniana, which I planted (mislabeled by Bracy's, as usual) thinking I'd bought the white Banksia. Fortuniana is a hybrid of white Banksia and Cherokee. I've also had spectacular results with Mermaid and Fortune's Double Yellow. And while the endlessly touted 'New Dawn' was a bit of a disappointment, the once-blooming parent from which it sported, Dr. W. VanFleet, was a disease-free giant (I measured some thirty-foot canes!!!). My family's 'official rose' is Silver Moon, a big, disease-free old Hybrid Wichuriana. My Great-Grandmother bought one during her glory days as one of the richest women in the Delta. After the Cotton Panic of '25 decimated her plantations and vaporized the banks in which she owned stock, our struggling family would make cuttings from that original plant, as they established their own homes. A big, pushy, loud church leveled her home in the Eighties (purchasing it with promises not to, of course...pathological lying being that denomination's other salient trait), and bulldozed her gardens. But that rose's progeny lives on, from River Oaks to Mountain Brook. Today, a generation of budding gardeners is making cuttings of those Silver Moons, for homes from Mendocino to the Isle of Palms. I also grew up with another probable Wichuriana hybrid that seems to have been 'Gardenia'. Lemon-Creme blooms, tea fragrance, apple-green foliage, totally free of disease. Dorothy Perkins is a Wichuriana hybrid, which, while prone to a dusting of surprisingly-attractive mildew, is otherwise fabulously healthy and wonderfully easy to root. I think I've seen Dorothy's deeper pink sister, 'Debutante', naturalized in the hedgerows, along roads leading to Natchez. Anyway, the Wichuriana class, while once-blooming (except for New Dawn), are fabulously healthy, and mostly immune to the occasional cold snaps which complicate things down south. Dr. W. VanFleet, BTW, is also a Hybrid Wichuriana. Before we moved up here, I was falling in love with what was sold to me (at the Greater Belhaven Farmer's Market)as the non-climbing form of the Polyantha, Clotilde Soupert. Not a trace of blackspot; continual bloom; wonderful scent; petal-packed, cabbagey little blooms, fading to a nice, neutral fleshy-pinky-offwhite; blooms well into early winter; GOOD SHADE TOLERANCE: what's not to love? An aunt in South Carolina passed this little mnemonic along to me from a rose lecture she'd attended: "Polyantha Noisette likes her Tea in a China cup." That sums up, pretty well, the classes of antique ever-blooming roses best for the South. Walking to class at Tulane, back in the days when it was still safe to be a couple of blocks lakeside from St. Charles, I'd pass rundown Uptown Victorian houses with ancient Tea roses out front. Can't tell you the names, but the old teas (and very first Hybrid Teas) develop a quite pleasant and substantial architecture. They'd cheer me up, blooming well into December, on basically neglected plants. The Hybrid musk with which I grew up was 'Eutin'. My Grandmother had her two out beneath some Pecan trees. Even with the shade and the sap (and without pruning), they bloomed all summer. I remember a fragrance which traveled far from the plant, although the plant is not listed as being fragrant. The Growth habit is upright and awkward, though, and you will have to prune a lot. Eutin could once be spotted in humble gardens all over Mississippi. Personally, I've grown the Hybrid Musks Cornelia and Vanity. Vanity has a very open growth habit, shocking pink blooms, and healthy foliage. Cornelia matures into a huge mess of a shrub, with plenty of blackspot, but also plenty of vigor. The fragrance is up there with Hyacinth, Winter Honeysuckle, Frangipani, and Lemon Blossom...it's that wonderful. One spray will perfume a hospital room or an office. Grow it in your Kitchen Garden, where its big, messy ever-blooming self won't be an aesthetic disaster. Or plant it in the front yard (as I foolishly did, at an apartment building I owned), and spend all your waking hours pruning it.

Lots of choices here for you, Carlene. Anna Olivier can definitely handle our downpours and poopoos our humidity. She's wonderful - in full bloom now in the heat, and I don't mean dinky little flowers. She's amazing. I wouldn't mind ten of her. Jeri Jennings doesn't ball either, but she also doesn't have many leaves. :(( The climber Duchesse d'Auerstadt is a nice bright yellow. Mine is only a year in the ground and had her first flush (maybe 10 flowers) a few weeks ago. No problem with rain. I have Blumenschmidt. I think she balled a little in the spring but that might have been from thrips rather than the cool, moist nights. She is interesting in that sometimes she is a deep yellow and other times light yellow with a green eye and some pink around the edges. Sherry

How contagious? We don't know. Some roses like New Dawn (except in Texas) seem to get it throughout their vascular system fast. Same with some multiflora-kin roses. I have saved roses in fall with the cut off the cane procedure more often than it's worked in spring. Mites are the proven vector. Root to root graft is possible for other viruses and I have two examples of situations when RRv has probably moved from root to roots. I had one rose where a blatantly sick cane rubbed against a healthy cane. Two weeks later, after I'd taken the sick cane off, the heathly cane was looking RRv-ish and we took the whole rose out. The mites don't overwinter in the 'form' that they are in the warmer months. Jim Amrine this past winter found one form of the fructiphilus mites on (IIRC) one in four bushes infected with RRD that he examined. In previous winters he hadn't found any (that's decades of looking). Jim uses a 20x hand lens to look for them in the field, that's the lens with the very small lens. I have put sick canes on our scanner and scanned at max magnification and then used the computer to zoom in further. The mites are the size of the lowest segment of an aphids leg. 200 microns long, slightly smaller than a thrips. The mites you are looking for are on the stem, not out on the leaves (the ones that are found on leaves are a different species and apparently aren't vectors.) Buford, it's always good to hear this kind of good news. It's not an instantaneous death sentence, but this only works for we who actually look at our roses beyond their blooms.