Again, ELISA, when properly done, is 100% effective, and has never once, in the 30-ish years we've used it, failed to give an accurate analysis. This is considering the following: 1. We always enclose "blind" samples of known infected and known uninfected tissue -- blind to the lab -- and unless the results come back with them correctly identifying all of those, we would not believe their results on our unknowns. That assures that virus titer is in a usable range on the day the test was done. In actual fact, in all those years, they (WSU Prosser's ELISA lab) have NEVER gotten one wrong, even once. Pretty good record. 2. Once that's done and a rose is "certified" clean (notice that ELISA is just one of the tripod of tests we run -- they're also tested with 'Mme. Butterfly' and 'Shirofugen' cherry -- all 3 must come out unambiguously clean) -- no rose once certified in that way has EVER later been found to have rose mosaic. Not one. Not ever. Not even in cold climates where all the intelligent people live. On rare occasions, the lab has said a test was somewhat ambiguous, and in those cases, we ignored all of the results from that run, and re-ran them later. 3. While we use the three tests for redundancy, we've never seen a case in which one test came out positive while the others came out negative -- in 100% of the roses I've ever tested, all three methods have agreed on their result. So obviously, the point of this long, drawn-out discussion with all kinds of complaints, is moot -- there is no problem here. We have no problem at all identifying where the disease is. No evidence to the contrary has been presented here. I would like to say that you can't argue with absolute 100% success, but obviously, there is one person who is determined to argue continuously with absolute 100% success! So yes, I'm just working our way toward the 150 posts mark, and hoping to keep us focused on the real issues, rather than being constantly drawn into perfectly silly little side arguments that are in and of themselves without merit.

Yes ma'am, a blog is one of the easier ways to chronicle information and make it available. It's almost like 'writing a book', only much cheaper and a lot more fun. I hope you find some interesting things there. Precisely! Anything that sufficiently stresses any organism is going to significantly impact immunity. It can also significantly impact fertility, ability to flower, grow, etc. When you boil it all down, virtually all families of organisms react similarly to the stimuli they encounter. When humans and other animals become sufficiently stressed due to malnutrition, over exercise, dehydration, they stop ovulating. Remember flowering is ovulation. Stress a plant by starving it, drying it out, pushing it to grow too vigorously through too much nitrogen, and it stops flowering. If you can think of one family of organisms in comparison to others, things start falling into place and making perfect sense. Oh, yes ma'am! Foetida, whose genes tell it to quickly push out those beautiful, marvelously scented leaves, use them up quickly, resulting in their entering senescence rapidly, then shedding them quickly due to the shorter warm season when ground water is available coming to an end. Mix those with the evergreen Tea genes which tell the organism to slowly produce those long-lasting, beautiful leaves, slowly meter their use so they last a long time, feeding, shading and moving water through the plant until the nearly year long growing season comes to an end and the next begins. Can you imagine how "confused" those leaves and plants are? The plant quickly pushes out foliage to use it up quickly, then refuse to shed it once it rapidly enters senility. Leaves which should only be expected to remain viable for a few months are "expected" to last all season long. You know what happens to "old foliage". It contracts rust and black spot. In this climate, Foetida remains healthy until quite late summer, early fall, when, where it naturally occurs, it would have shed its foliage due to lack of water and deteriorating weather. But, the first (and in many cases, several generations) generation hybrids of it with Teas and HTs are frequently disasters in moister years. I wonder why... There really isn't one source of information I can suggest to you for learning much about Pernet's work, other than the 1920s through about 1950 ARS annuals. LeGrice in "Rose Growing Complete" (1970s paperback edition rather than the earlier 1965 hardback); Jack Harkness, "Roses", again about 1977, both wrote about Pernet's Foetida work and what many results were, but in those early annuals, you find MANY reports of how his efforts performed for people across the country and even the world. You can't blame Pernet for the black spot issues, though. There is a famous story of someone listening to him speak of his roses, then asking him, "What about the black spot?" Pernet reportedly responded, "What black spot?" They didn't black spot for him in his climate, so he didn't know it was an issue until others, elsewhere reported it. Ralph Moore raise some incredibly interesting, beautiful and imaginative hybrid Rugosas and Bracteatas. There was one hybrid Rugosa with beautiful foliage; long, elegant, pointed buds of a medium red with buttery yellow reverse. They opened to scented, double, almost ruffled open flowers and bloomed constantly. The foliage was quite attractive and the plant had a decent architecture. There was also a striped, red and white, double, open, ruffled Rugosa hybrid on a decent, bushy plant which flowered all the time. He gave the ruffled one to Tom Carruth for Week's to test. I also grew both in my Newhall garden. A season or two after taking them home, I asked him about how Week's found them and he said Tom had mentioned they weren't interested because of the rust. Mr. Moore responded, "What rust?" They also rusted for me in spring and fall, but it required several more years for it to appear in Visalia because that climate didn't support rust on them, like Pernet's climate didn't support black spot on his Pernetianas. Mr. Moore's hybrid Bracteatas didn't rust for him in Visalia, but most did here. I could only grow Muriel, Out of Yesteryear, Out of the Night (his best for this climate), Star Dust, Star Magic, Pink Powderpuff and Huntington Red Bracteata in these climates without spray. All the others were just too rusty unsprayed. David Austin experienced very much the same thing. He had no idea for many years what his roses did when unleashed in longer, milder climates. Reports were he was astounded to see his "mannerly five foot shrubs" exploding into twenty-plus foot monsters. That's why it required as many years as it did for his catalog to reflect so many of his roses were suitable for growing as climbers. If you believed his British catalog, or even the Texas catalog for the first few years, you had no idea how monstrous many of his roses could become. LeGrice wrote of a very good yellow HT he raised from Pernet's work. It scored quite well in the trials early on, until it was discovered the plants defoliated completely after flowering, re grew the leaves, flowered well and defoliated again. That was an issue with many of Harm Saville's roses and quite a few of Joe Winchell's. So much inbreeding had been done to fix desired characteristics, some terminal ones were engineered in quite deeply. What too few seem to remember is, "recessives are forever". Yes, Pernet's and Mr. Moore's focuses were far too narrow when it came to their "obsessions". Thankfully, both produced some good plants along those routes, and they did push the envelope, but, as with most breeding lines, it required and will require, many other hands over many more years to refine their efforts into plants acceptable in today's gardens. You can't fault Pernet too badly. His climate didn't let his roses black spot. Hybrid Teas weren't yet very strong, attractive plants for the most part. Some were quite good, but the push for the "novel" was so great, anything different was greedily snapped up and promoted all over the rose growing world. They didn't have to be "healthy", nor did they have to really grow well, as the use of chemicals was accepted everywhere. If you grew roses, you dusted or sprayed. There were complaints about weaker growers, but the buying public still clamored to buy them because the flowers were so different and so amazing compared to anything previously seen. They didn't have to root at all as no one sold them own root. The thrived where suited and languished where they weren't. It took many years for them to be refined to the point of being "assimilated into the HT family", where their descendents could be grown more easily in many more climates. American roses didn't have to start becoming pretty "garden plants" until the 1950s. It wasn't until after WWII and the burgeoning new "Middle Class" whose large, suburban lots began making landscape use of roses that any real American demand arose for decent looking plants. Now we have increasingly smaller and smaller areas available to plant anything, and whatever is chosen had better look "on" much more than "off". There simply isn't room to have much else to take your focus away from something "dowdy looking". It hasn't been all that long that resistance to using toxins for pleasure has been more the rule. We didn't truly understand the costs of dusting weekly with DDT, nicotine-sulfate, or spraying with antibiotics and organophosphates until relatively recently compared to the length of their use. It wasn't as large an issue when the stinky spray was applied way out in the back yard where you probably wouldn't smell it in the house, but put it under the livingroom window or by the front door and that quickly changes! It's very possible you have multiple plants of Simplicity. J&P used to advertise them as "roses by the yard". They were offered own root in many cases and with quantity discounts, something not generally done with American garden roses. Simplicity was promoted as an ever flowering hedge, requiring only the basic care and even forgiving of shearing like other hedging material. It was very much a throwback to the 1950s when mail order nurseries were offering Ragged Robin (Gloire des Rosomanes) with quantity discounts for use as hedging. It was in response to that practice with that rose Mr. Moore released Pink Clouds (1956) to compete in that market. Somewhere, I have one of Sequoia's 1957 pamphlets advertising Pink Clouds as a hedging plant. Sequoia produced much wholesale stock for many other larger mail order concerns, so he had a front row seat to observe what was being offered. Kim

There is mention of a climber far earlier than 1947. Check out the references section on HMF. Here are a couple of them: "List of Roses Now In Cultivation At Chateau El�onore, Cannes Book (1898) Page(s) 33. Sombreuil Tea - Moreau Robert, 1851 Creamy white, tinted with pink, large, full, and well formed, hardy and vigorous, producing large quantities of flowers. It is very effective growing up trees. Has a resemblances to the Bourbon type." "Deutsches Rosenbuch Book (1889) Page(s) 131. Tea roses. Sombreuil (Robert-Moreau 1858). Large, double, white, slightly salmon. Forcing rose, vigorous, climbing." Multiple other sources cited on HMF, including much earlier than the above, comment about how very vigorous the rose is. However, there is a lack of consistency regarding the descriptions of its color, the number of petals (semi-double or full--and on Vintage's website very double), and the shape of the flower (for instance flat, cupped, or globular). Read ALL the references, in particular the quite old ones, and then compare them to the photos on HMF. The comments section makes for very interesting reading, especially those by John Hook. He makes some good points. Also note the comments on this picture, http://www.helpmefind.com/rose/l.php?l=21.172590&tab=32 Melissa Here is a link that might be useful: John Hook's remarks on HMF about

Lovely pictures of some classic beauties! I drool every time I see a picture of Dainty Bess...not sure why I've never grown it, but need to add it to my wish list. Most that I grow have already been pictured, but here are a few that haven't: Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria (1891) Francis Dubreuil (1894) Gruss an Aachen (1909) Night (Lady Sackville) 1921 Rubyait (1946) Fragrant Cloud (1963) Electron (1970)