I have a pondside deck/pergola that is somewhat smaller at about 7'x 12'. I have a white Wisteria (bought it before I knew what it was :-) on one post, a 'Star Jasmine' on another post, and a Mandevilla 'Alice Dupont' in a pot going up a third post. On a cedar/copper fence next to the pergola I have two roses, an 'America' and a 'Stairway to Heaven' and 2 Clematis, a 'Julka' and a 'Toki'. The white wisteria and I have a love hate relationship....I absolutely love the fragrance and the shade the foliage provides for us to sit pondside and imbibe after a long hard day. Before it matured we had to have a shade cloth because of the afternoon sun. What I hate is the mess that the blossoms make in the spring and the leaves in the fall. The pond has koi so I'm forever trying to keep it out of the water. This is only year two for the roses and clematis so it's a bit too soon to get ga-ga over them yet :-) The mandevilla was great the first year but I tried to overwinter inside with marginal results. The jasmine is just now overcoming our strange winter.

I'd definitely agree, go with Illusion among those two choices, particularly in zone 6. I haven't been able to get Crimson Sky to overwinter in zone 5 and even if it survives in zone 6 it's not likely to be a climber. Also, $59 is an insanely expensive price to pay for a rose - we could do better than that. For instance, Regan's sells Crimson Sky for under $20, though they're done with bareroot sales for this year. An alternative to Illusion that blooms a lot more often for me is Quadra, and it would be rock solid hardy for you and pretty trouble free. Both Quadra and Illusion are available from Hortico for $17.99 plus shipping, and those are bareroot grafted roses that give the rose a little head start toward settling in to be a climber. Roses Unlimited also carries Illusion, and a gallon sized plant is a bit bigger than a band-sized plant, though both will grow fine. Those would be own-root plants, where there isn't a graft and the same rose would regrow if you have to cut it back to the ground (shouldn't be necessary with both of these latter two roses). Here is Illusion on one side of my front yard in a good year - the trouble is it only does this about 3 times a year at best so there are times it's just green. A more reliable bloomer most of the season for me is Quadra, which is at the other end of my house in similar conditions. Quadra will have some rest periods, but it looks like this off and on all summer. Both of these roses are healthy and hardy, though any rose takes some pruning out of dead wood periodically. Both are also toward the crimson side of red rather than "fire engine red", which applies to a whole lot of red roses frankly. Do remember that any climber takes about 3-4 years to fully settle in, so don't expect either one to look like this in its first couple of years. You want a climber to put on growth and build cane structure in the first few years, and blooms are secondary considerations at first. Also be sure to use something to tie the canes to a climbing structure (they don't hang on themselves like clematis does) and do your best to train as many of the biggest canes to bend sideways or horizontally, so that the blooming canes or "laterals" stretch upward from those initial sideways canes. Otherwise you can get blooms just at the tips of those main canes and not all along the way. You can see a cane bending sideways for Quadra in the photo above toward the right side of the arch, and that cane itself isn't blooming until the laterals that branch off it are growing. Hope this helps! Cynthia

Wow that arbor was a steal!! I assume it's one of those heavy plastic ones? Nice. It's gonna look great out there when everything gets going! Are you using that wheelbarrow as a planter? My husband brought home two old ones from his mom's house when it sold a couple yrs ago. The tires were flat and they were really rusty. We already had a nice big one, so I had him drill a few holes in the bottom and I just planted some mini roses, snapdragons and petunias in them! They're out in the veggie pen. I love feeding the birdies too! Started with the hummies, then the wild birds. And now it's the chickies! My husband and younger son were out hoeing up that horrible foxtail grass out of some of the walkways down below. We can't afford for our dumb dog to get those damn things in her paw again! The rain made all that crap come back with a vengeance! The foxtail and wild carrot (not sure what it really is) are about 3ft tall! The chickens won't eat it tho. I guess it's too rough. Oh, Irisgal, I think SDMLV does blow kinda fast. That bloom is about two days old. I didn't detect any scent on her whatsoever. I was kinda expecting a nice perfume...

Yes ma'am, Comtesse. It isn't "instinct", but remember apical dominance? Canes taper as they lengthen. The capillaries inside them taper toward their ends, too. Then, you add both the adhesion factor of water and transpiration through the stomata, the pores on the undersides of the leaves and you have "growth". Apical dominance simply means the apex, the end of the cane, is dominant. It is where the growth and flowering will occur. That exists due to the increased sap pressure at the ends of the canes, or rather IS the increased sap pressure there. The adhesion factor of water simply means water is sticky. It sticks to surfaces. When a tapered tube (remember capillaries are tapered?) is inserted into a container of water, the water sticks to the tapered sides and raises itself over the water level in the container. If the tube (capillary) continues tapering as it lengthens, the water keeps sticking to it and pushes itself upward toward the end of the tube, hence "pressure". But, you need some real flow to push rapid growth. This is where the stomata come in. The stomata are pores on the leaf undersides. They open at night and begin closing in the light and heat and function very much as our skin pores do. Have you ever noticed the droplets of water surrounding the edges of leaf margins early in the morning? This is guttation ( the secretion of droplets of water from the pores of plants). I know you've likely had mornings when you have said to yourself, "they literally grew over night!". Well, they did! So, you have the adhesion factor of water making it rise above its own level in tapered tubes; the capillaries tapering as they lengthen and the stoma transpiring the extra water all coming together to create "apical dominance" which is why they grow at their highest points. This is also what causes laterals to grow upward from horizontally placed canes. "Sap pressure". The "instinct" to grow upward. I agree with you one of the functions of prickles is to allow for "grasping" to allow the plant to push itself through the undergrowth and canopies of surrounding plants, into the sun. They also function on several as water collectors. Minutifolia and Stellata (as well as some others from arid regions) have very tiny, dense bristles which permit fog to condense in them and run down the canes to the roots. Some have suggested they are also armature to fend off grazing animals, but if you've ever noticed what gets eaten, deer, rabbits, squirrels and rats seem to take no notice of prickles when they eat the plants. You can eat anything if you take small enough bites. The "climbing" trait does exist in several species and appears dominant in several of them. "China" roses are generally considered to be bushes, though there are climbing sports of them. Miniatures are also generally considered to be China rose based, though Ralph Moore felt from his work with so much of the rose family that miniaturization was available from several other sources, Wichurana and multiflora to mention two. Even miniatures sport to climbing forms, so it seems most expressions of plant type seem possible from most species and areas of the "family tree". Oh, how I agree with your statement to work with instead of against them! It is exactly what Jeri has also said forever...plant what is happy to be with you. If whatever it is isn't happy where you are, give it away or put it in the trash. If you grow what's happy where you are, you get to do more enjoying with far less effort, time and work, not to mention chemical intervention. I would add you have to be willing to ignore a bit of disease, too. In many cases, with many roses, early and late mildew will go away when it gets warmer. Unless the thing is a powdered donut most of the time, I ignore short bouts of it. Rust? That's one I have very little patience for, but a bit of it very late in the season on old foliage, I will turn a blind eye to. Black spot isn't the issue here it is elsewhere, but I'm sure some of the occasional spotting I encounter is that. But, it isn't major and if it gets to the point I can't ignore it, I will dump the offending rose before I will add any chemical to my garden. I am cheap. I am lazy and I have already been exposed to as many chemicals as I intend to willingly allow so the rose goes first. I never wanted to find poisoned quail, road runners, rabbits or coyotes in the old Newhall garden and it would kill me to find out something I had done in this one resulted in the harm of any of the Canine Goddesses in the house. No rose (or any other plant) is worth that.