North of you a bit but still without a lot of cold, my garden is home to a dozen or so once bloomers. We rarely get any actual frost, but we have more chill hours (below 40ºF) than you do in your area. They all bloom reliably but perhaps for not as long a period as they would in a cold-winter climate. Having said that, Félicité Parmentier does best of them all. This is one happy rose here. Others that have done well for me here include Léda and Konigen von Danemark. Watch Léda; it has definite runaround tendencies. Madame Plantier suffered from being overcrowded and overshadowed. I have moved it into a new spot with a trellis for support, and expect great things. None of the gallicas truly thrive, alas, and I do love then so. Charles de Mills does better than the others, but it probably has a lot of china in its background and is often called a hybrid china. Speaking of once bloomers, have you tried R Moschata? This species rose blooms here from early June until frost, if you get any frost, and otherwise until sometime in fall. By bloom I mean a nearly continuous show. Big clusters of showy singles and an amazing perfume that wafts make this rose well worth growing. It is healthy for me here. I grow it as a large, rounded, freestanding shrub. Oh, I wanted to tell you that there are some species tulips that don't need any winter chill. Many of them are tiny and none of them are truly large, but I find clusiana and saxitilis to be well worth while. Check John Scheepers's catalog for a really nice listing. Also the Old House Gardens catalog has a good selection of daffodils that do well in warm climate gardens without winter chill. Rosefolly

Jeri - does your "Jose A. Africa" set hips? One of the noticeable things bout my Cl AB is that it hardly sets any - the blooms drop their petals, and then dry up, and the little stem dies back to the next leaf. You can see that in the picture I posted above. I just went out and looked at two of my bushes, and among hundreds of dried up remnants of blooms (I obviously did not dead head!), I found only one hip - here is a picture of it so you can compare it to any you might have on your bush of JAA> Jackie

Some can "rebloom" once they hit maturity. I often had repeat on my enormous Silvermoon in the desert. Though many can provide further flowers as Dr. Manners offered, some don't require the changes in weather to stimulate it. Some will seem to repeat because the spring like weather lasts longer. Along the coast here in Southern California, "spring" lasts for many months until the summer heat hits. There, the Banksiae roses flower for many months. A number of the old ramblers will follow suit. Some can be tricked into reblooming. I grew Schoener's Nutkana for many years and found if I permitted it to set seed, hold them for a few weeks, then completely dead head the plant, water it heavily and feed it, the plant repeated its spring performance as it thought it had over wintered and entered another spring season due to the loss of its hips, increased food and water. There are a number of reasons and ways to cause these things to happen. Kim

That is exciting---Many years ago we went to Martha's Vineyard for our yearly visit in Oct.---much to my surprise the Lilacs and Forsythia were all in bloom----One of my friends who lives year-round on the Island said it was because of Hurricane Bob---seems the water washed up on all the plants and then the temps dropped so everything was frozen----well according to my friend the plants all thought winter had come and gone so they proceeded to burst into their "spring bloom"----it was really something to see Florence