It sure takes patience! The rose seems to keep get mixed up with Erinnerung an Brod. I still hope an American rose nursery will import roses from my clone of SDAL. I posted a picture on HMF today showing the Buds and sepals of the rose - to help people distinguish it from Erinnerung an Brod. Here is a link that might be useful: SDAL pic posted on HMF today

Very knowledgeable folks have already given you very good insights here. I can only add that it is perfectly natural for older canes to get woody and brown, red, or gray, as you're describing. It's not a disease. Some old canes are very hard and near impossible to prune off (is this what you mean by "petrified"?) while others that are dead will sort of splinter/crumble if you cut them. When these hard older canes cease to put out any new growth, these are the canes that one would prune off down to the ground in early spring. Hopefully this helps to rejuvenate the bush and stimulate it to throw out fresh new basal canes from the base of the bush. Younger canes bloom better. (Incidentally, alfalfa meal contains a substance, triacontanol, which can help stimulate a bush to grow new fresh canes, too. You can throw a couple handfuls around each bush in addition to whatever other fertilizer you're already using.) All this said, as others have pointed out, roses grow and bloom best when they receive adequate sun and from your photos, these roses don't have that... If your clients aren't interested in replanting the roses where there is more sun or limbing up some of the trees on their property, you could suggest replacing those that are struggling the most with roses that are reported to be more shade tolerant. I'm guessing they are growing hybrid teas? Two HT's that have done ok for me in a part sun bed are Bronze Star and Peter Mayle. I have read Granada is somewhat shade tolerant. Pink Gruss an Aachen grows in the shade of a deciduous magnolia here and gives a great first flush and scattered blooms in part shade the rest of the season. I have several David Austin roses that bloom well in part sun (Pat Austin & Molineux) and hybrid musks and albas are two other classes of roses to look into, for tolerating less than ideal sun conditions. Still, all these "shade tolerant" roses tend to bloom better the more sun they have. Your clients need to adjust their expectations of any roses they're growing if they can't provide a rose it's preferred growing conditions. I don't envy you that task. ;) Regarding your questions about the black fungus on the base of the containerized rose, perhaps I'm missing what you are trying to photograph, but I'm not seeing any fungus. My first thought, too, given the diameter of the trunk versus the diameter of the pot, was that this rose has just outgrown the pot and is possibly very rootbound. It looks to me like as this rose has grown it may have pushed up out of the soil, leaving a gap or hole. If you cannot replant the rose in a bigger container or rootprune it and replant it in fresh potting mix, you could at least add some compost and lime. (If that rose is still in the original soil from whenever the rose was planted, the pH could be far from ideal now...) Hope some of this helps. Dawn

Thanks!

It looks like winter damage to me. Prune a cane to see if your pith is clean or brown in the center.