Roses are like children: you give them the best environment you can, then cross your fingers. Expectations are just asking for disappointment. They become who they are and most do well enough. I rarely shovel prune anyone still alive.

I do love the flowers but to me they are the icing on the cake. I want a beautiful plant with disease free (ha) foliage first that will respond to my ministrations. Of course this has to be accomplished with no chemicals. My gardener takes my discards & nourishes them as they gradually decline, I am patient for 3 years then it's do or die (figuratively speaking) time. My most successful ones have been Marie Pavie, Vif Eclat, Madame Plantier, Seafoam, Cl Pinkie, Darlow's Enigma,Marie Bugnet & Moje Hammarberg, there are others still under evaluation. Lovely photo Sara-Ann. Oh, & fragrance isn't an absolute must for me, I can always throw in a fragrant annual or perennial like flowering tobacco. When people come in my garden they always comment on the fragrance, the roses are not solely responsible for that.

Jane

I want reasonable health, a beautiful color, and a fair amount of fragrance. I don't spray. I'm willing to give them 3 years or so to show me the goods, but after that, I'm going to dig up or otherwise abandon them. I dumped Midnight Blue a few weeks ago. Displeasing deep mauve/maroon flowers that barely last a day or two, they were supposed to be purple and aren't, not enough scent, and a really shrimpy bush. I may dump Cornelia next year if she doesn't perk up this coming summer. Tiny blooms, not much scent at all, and scanty everything. Unimpressive. I got Maid of Honor at Costco two years ago. Looked great there, and it was a $5 experiment, along with another one. Maid of Honor is a totally different color where I put her and not thriving. I'm too lazy to dig her out, so she is in sink or swim mode. The other Costco rose was Gold Glow (?), which is going gangbusters. The flowers don't last long, but it's 5+ feet tall, about 3 feet wide, and has beautiful flowers that smell sweet, so it stays.

Lifes to short so yep I have SP my share of roses...(No spray)...We do not have a lot of room to plant a lot of roses so the roses we do plant must be disease resistant and adapt well to our area... Bloom decently & be somewhat cane hardy... No regrets because each year I feel our garden gets better by following this practice...

Great pic Sara Ann!

I agree with Jim. Life is short and I have limited garden space so any roses don't make my heart sings (cut flowers/unique) and sensitive with powdery mildew will be sp to make room for other roses. On my list of this year will be Chrysler Imperial, Mr Lincoln, Sunsprite, Scarlet Knight, Luscious, Ruby Ruby, Texas. I think my mom may have room for them. Helen.

I have a hard time throwing away anything that's alive, but space is valuable so if I don't love something, I usually try to find a friend to give it to who might love it. As far as roses go, I'm a fairly new gardener in general and all the roses I've chosen myself are still young so I can't speak for those, but the ones that came with the house have given me some grief. In general the plants were so neglected that I spent the last three years reviving them and they've greatly improved.

Still, the rose hedge surrounding my patio has a couple of bushes with crown gall, but I have no idea what the cultivar is so I'm loathe to dig them up for fear of not being able to find replacements. Other than the unsightly tumors (which aren't too visible anyhow) they perform like champs so I'm just leaving them be.

I also have some unknown pink hybrid tea (I think) in a north facing spot that has had an annoying myriad of issues since day one. Its canes were so old and damaged that it took me a few years of careful pruning and encouraging new canes to finally come to a point where just this year(!!!) all the canes are finally strong, evenly spaced, a fresh green healthy color, and readily awaiting spring. The first 2 years the blooms were so overrun by thrips that after 2 years of no open blooms I finally bit the bullet and sprayed with spinosad. Which I'm glad of by the way, because the issue has not returned. To top it all off, the bush itself would become such an unsightly mess from the severe rust it got that it spent more time looking naked as I methodically went through removing all the leaves. And I'm STILL having a hard time deciding to SP it. Mostly because I'm so excited to finally have all the old, damaged, diseased canes out of the way. I also think I'll transplant it since I don't think it's in a good spot anyhow and more sun should help with the rust issue. Is it too late to transplant it, I wonder?

I'm selfish. I expect them to return all the care and lovely fertilizer I lavish on them. I will try and turn the poor performers around-- by moving them, amping up the water, whatever they seem to need. If that still doesn't work, out they go. Then in a year or two I will put in something else. I'm not hasty on either end-- roses can be on probation for up to 3 years, and they have to remain on my wish list for that long before I order them.

To respond to level of care I give it. Good care--disease free foliage and lots of blooms. No care--death.

I expect a lot from my roses - they have to perform for me or they are gone! I need masses of deeply fragrant blooms, preferably also suitable for cutting. I have shovel pruned good roses that flower reliably such as Ingrid Bergman to make room for more fragrant varieties such as Rouge Royale. I am pretty happy with my collection at the moment and only one rose is at risk of getting shovel pruned and that is Blush Noisette. This one balls all the time in my garden or gets fried by the hot dry sun. I don't think it will be with me much longer once her neighbours start to grow bigger.

This is interesting, and I appreciate everyone's input so far. Sometimes I wish I had a crystal ball that would tell me which roses would do the best for me.

Fragrancenutter, I'm glad you expect a lot from your roses, because I certainly enjoy them, they are truly amazing!

That would take a lot of the fun of experimenting out of it, though. It would certainly be financially less exhausting!

I'm not getting any younger, so during the past several years I've been hard on roses. Now, I will give a bush 3 years to prove itself to me. The first and most important is the bush MUST be a decent looking shrub, clothed in good looking foliage. I've seen beautiful blooms on bush's that looked awful. You know, the kind of bush you don't want anyone to see. I have a lot of people that come to my home and everyone talks about how beautiful and healthy the bush's look. If it hasn't passed my "shrub" test by the middle of it's 3rd year, I'll be hunting for a replacement. I don't give ugly bushs away. They end up on the burn pile.

Next is the bloom. Different varieties have different blooms and I pretty much know what I'm expecting when I buy it. If it is a new rose and the bloom doesn't appeal to me for whatever reason and the bush looks good, I'll try to find a home for it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is when the bush is 3 years old, I can stand back and smile, it's got a home.

Giving a rose three years to prove itself, does seem reasonable to me. I can just imagine that you have a beautiful display during rose season, Ken.

I hate it when a rose bush is healthy, but puts out loads of blooms I don't like, that was the way Dublin was. I think it's when a bloom doesn't quite live up to my expectations, it's disappointing. When I see that rose on HMF, it still looks good to me, so maybe the blooms would have improved. If Mother Nature hadn't taken care of that rose for me, because of drought, I don't know whether I would have kept it or not.

What I'd like and what I settle for are two different things. We all want healthy roses that grow well and bloom a lot. The reality is we try a lot of things and see what does best and go from there. I have a lot of roses that aren't nearly as healthy as I wish they were but I've kept them around because they continue to grow and bloom well. Others met the shovel because they dwindled to one cane wonders and weren't worth my efforts to hang on to. There are a few that I kept, even though they tend to be sickly and weak, solely because I was crackers over the blooms. But I've found that even those are losing out to the shovel now days because I just don't have the energy I used to have to fuss over them. It's finding the balance between the amount of effort and the amount of enjoyment.

I think Seil is absolutely right. I am lazy so I want lots of enjoyment from my roses with the least amount of effort .

I wish I was patient enough to wait 3 years. Even if the flower is perfect if the Bush is without leaves most of the time. Bye Bye hello shovel. No Spray.

Thank you, Sara-Ann for starting this topic. It's interesting how everyone determines which roses they'll hang on to and which roses will be removed, one way or another.

For me, what Seil said. I don't have as many roses as she has, though. I want to keep my numbers at about 50 +/- since there aren't that many places in our yard that will support roses and those spots need to be shared with other things. I wish I knew ahead of time which roses would do well for me, but it truly is an experiment.