I just donated my Duchess of Albany to Brooklyn Botanical Garden...If you love LaFrance you'll love it. Old drawings of it show a truly red rose it is not. A deeper magenta pink reverse is all it is , it was worth looking at for 2 years and studying. I have a small space so it needed to go. I have a problem with own root LaFrance it's usually not very vigorous. I have a grafted Pickering LaFrance and it's a bloom machine. Own root if it's double it's size in 2 years you'll be lucky..great fragrance unbeatable like LaFrance.

I'm in San Antonio. If it is Flower Carpet, I planted mine in full sun and it quickly died. (Pink) I bought mine last year, around this time for $5.00. (So I bought 3) I kept looking at local rose society webpages and the Texas recommended roses and couldn't find any mention of them at all. Then, I found a webpage from a university in Alabama. It did a study of numerous new roses. Flower Carpet was one of them. The study concluded that they could not tolerate Alabama's heat. However, I swear that I see them growing around here and they look beautiful!!! I kept the remaining Flower Carpets in pots. And out of the sun. This spring, one finally started blooming. It was in full shade!!!! If I finally get around to planting them in the ground, I'm going to put them in no more than part shade and I'm going to wait until the fall. Knock Out has a nice red. I planted one this Feb and it's doing wonderfully. I know that a lot of roses are on sale right now. Other people on the forum might have experience planting roses in late May. I have found that my new roses in general wanted a bit of shade. I quickly accomplished this by planting a Vitex near then and also my Fall Asters are bushy enough to shade them. I planted both the Vitex and Asters in early April. Both are drought tolerant. I can always take the Vitex out at the end of the summer. They can be moved easily. I'm calling it my "annual" tree.

Apparently I have 5 De Ruiter roses. DIORAMA, ESPERANCE, KIMONO, ROSALYN CARTER and SWEET UNIQUE. Two of those are florist roses, and I know they have quite a few florist roses. DIORAMA is a lovely rose I got many yrs ago from Vintage Gardens. Hasn't bloomed a whole lot in recent yrs. But I haven't gotten the bed it's in cleaned out in awhile. Hopefully I haven't lost it! ESPERANCE is one of the florist roses. Got it from Carlton's yrs ago. It's lovely, very-long lasting rose. Got KIMONO from Cliff before he opened up EuroDesert Roses. It's been an "ok" rose. Not really very exciting. ROSALYNN CARTER (aka PRINS CLAUS) is one I got many yrs ago from Hortico. She's a lovely rose. I need to get her in the ground. Been in a pot for over 10yrs. SWEET UNIQUE is the other florist rose, also from Carltons. Been a decent rose, but doesn't repeat as well as I'd like. The blooms are pretty tho.

Yes, I grow it, wonderful rose! It takes the heat like a champion, we had 3 straight weeks of 100+ , days as high as 110, nights still in the 80s, and Voodoo bloomed right through it. The colors are wonderful, you’ll see apricot, yellow orange and red, sometimes all on the same flower. The fragrance is very good, too. The plant is bushy, healthy, has very glossy foliage. I’m glad you asked about it, it doesn’t seem to generate much interest here and that’s a shame. I’d vote Voodoo over both DCT (far more fragrant, ages better) and Valencia (more interesting color).