Good choices, yes they are really really black spot resistant. Wedding Bells may get powdery mildew if you have high mildew pressure. I have found in the first year that roses go thru a lot to get to your garden. Those hardships can cause them to get diseases that they otherwise won't have. You have chosen your roses well.

From your list I haven't gotten Wedding Bells until I hear more about mildew.

The only reason I'd not pick up Bull's Eye is that I'd rather have Eyes For You.

Other than those I now have nearly all of the Kordes roses. This is so exciting can't wait for them to establish. There is a web page Newflora Roses that is pretty honest about the ratings for the Kordes roses. Since many of these are quite new not all have much information on Help Me Find as of yet.

I have not tried any of those roses so I have no idea firsthand. Roses can be really blackspot resistant in some areas but not in others so no rose is truly blackspot resistant everywhere... But hopefully they do well for you! Let us know in the future please...

Another observation I've had with my BS resistant roses is.....if they are not plant near a BS susceptible rose, they often stay BS clean. I have the Easy Elegance rose Funny Face & it is usually BS free but one year I planted a Grandiflora next to it that came down with a bad case of BS. 2 branches of FF on the side towards the Grandiflora came down with BS but the rest of the bush was BS free. Shovel pruned the Grandiflora & FF has been BS free since.

Thanks for the replies! I think I going to try Eyes For You too.

Only have Savannah from your list. Completely clean in this central VA no spray garden for a year now.

greenburgroses: Could you please name the advertisers whose claims were not borne out in your garden? These claims would seem to constitute bad behavior, and thus need to see the light of day. Here, on these pages.

Mine is beginning its second season and is healthy and clean of BS. I do spray, but already lots of my roses have BS now. Thrips liked it last year. It is time for the blue cups.

Hi rifts, pretty much all rose companies have listed certain roses as disease resistant that ended up not being resistant.

Julia Child is a prime example. It is a martyr to blackspot in my area yet it was touted as blackspot resistant. Pretty Lady (the floribunda) is another one that was listed as blackspot free; also a martyr to blackspot. The Kordes rose Brother's Grimm is another one. It completely defoliated to blackspot last summer yet it is listed as blackspot free on every site I can find. .

To the growers' defense, they cannot possibly test the roses in every location and against every strain of blackspot. Plus, the blackspot fungus mutates. I don't think it is deception on their part, but I have learned to wait a few years after a rose is released and check with other gardeners before I spend money.

Welcome to Pa...lol... I just planted a new Julia Child... The JC at my friends house does ok but does BS but doesn't drop a lot of leaves. 3 blocks from here is a JC which blackspots very badly toward the end of the season...(August) But thought I'd try it anyhow...I can always break out my shovel...lol

jim1961 Julia Child is worth growing despite the blackspot. I can't get enough of the fragrance.

i've found that if you keep the plant as healthy as possible, you'll have far less black spot also good air circulation is essential so plant them an adequate distance apart when i have those things under control, i actually can't tell much difference in roses that are supposed to be black spot resistant and roses that are supposed to be susceptible i use fertilizer for the soil not the plant, then i expect the plant to get nutrients from the soil this really does work for me

As the person at Newflora who does the ratings there is so much to say about disease resistance. You are right it is hard to test every location. We know there are at least 12 races of black spot and I think probably more across N. America. The other things I find to affect disease resistance in a particular plant is stress whether it be drought, lack of fertilizer, a hard winter, wrong soil pH can also affect the disease resistance. I would compare it to a person being more susceptible to colds when they are run down or stressed.

In one of the threads on this site I mentioned Brothers Grimm had shown black spot in the Midwest but we have never seen it any other place in the world. I can't explain it, but I do believe it had a very bad black spot in this trial location.

What we do before we introduce a rose is send it to trial sites across N. America to see the disease tolerance. Kordes also widely tests the roses in Europe. We run our trials with no sprays and try and promote disease by leaving diseased plants in the field and overhead watering to promote black spot. I have strong mildew at my trial site in spring and again in fall. We work very hard to try and deliver roses with excellent disease resistance.

That said as we work hard at creating disease resistance roses the fungus is also busy mutating and changing. I don't think we will ever create a perfect rose or if we do the fungus will eventually find a way around it. Realistically I think the way to look at roses is to see if it can maintain health through the summer and maintain at lease the upper 70 percent of the foliage until fall with no spray. In fall as roses start to shut down for the season there may be more disease, but with just a little time left I don't worry about this. The test is that you enjoyed the rose and did not need to spray fungicides to have a great looking rose for the season. A few leaves with spots should not be too great a factor. With mildew if there is a little leaf wrinkle I know it has some susceptibility. but it is keeping the foliage and will be all right when climate conditions change. If it destroys the leaves and ruins the buds, well then it is not something we would introduce.

The reason I follow this site is to get feedback on how the roses are performing in a wide geographic area. I learn a lot and if I have something helpful to add when there are questions I do comment. I learned something on this post because Beth's report on Savannah is the first time we have heard of black spot on Savannah. I hope it is transitory for you Beth because this is one of my favorites.

Greenburgroses if you are in the south then Wedding Bells has been performing really well on disease and bloom. Plum Perfect is really doing well in the south, but I am not sure about its vigor in the north. We have not finished trials. We introduced PP for southern gardens as part of the Sunbelt series. Poseidon is healthy in the south although tending to be tall. If you buy it you should prune it hard (to 2 feet) in the late winter to maintain it at 3.5'. Savannah is doing well in the south (except at Beth's house :) ) It won awards at Biltmore no spray competition and also did well at the trail at thee U. of Georgia Athens.

Wishing very good results with your rose garden.

zippity1, I practice exactly what you stated above here...Matter fact the nearest rose bush beside our newly planted Julia Child is a very disease resistant Double Ko and its 7 ft away ...

Chris great write up! I'll be trying some Kordes roses in the future... Thanks!

Greenburgroses is here in the Northeast in Pa same as I am Chris...

Hi Chris2486, I really appreciate your response. I love your website and your efforts to market Kordes roses. I think the intent of my post came across the wrong way. I am frustrated with the different strains of blackspot and with blackspot mutating, NOT the growers or breeders. Pretty Lady was the one that really hurt. It was bulletproof for years and then a certain strain of blackspot came along and it started defoliating badly (as did all of the hybrids I had of it...5 years of breeding efforts down the tubes; very frustrating!). I am now much more careful at choosing roses I use for parents.

I have been keeping an eye on a lot of the Kordes roses at local no-spray rose gardens (New York Botanic Gardens, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and Swarthmore College) and your assessments have been very accurate. Brothers Grimm has certainly been the rare case. Just so you are aware, where I saw it having problems with blackspot was at the Lewis Ginter Botanic Gardens in Virginia. I was there in the late fall, so to be fair, it may have held onto its leaves until the end of the summer, but there were probably 5 plants and all were about halfway defoliated at the end of September/early October. It was near a perfectly healthy Lions Rose.

I am really happy to hear about Savannah and Plum Perfect since I bought them already. I also just bought Dark Desire. I will be spraying them with disease spores I collected from up and down the east coast, so I'll find out pretty soon how they do here! I can tell you that Eliza, Poseiden, Garden Delight, and Mandarin Ice have all been disease free so far. Beverly loses some leaves, but only at the end of the season; still pretty remarkable for a hybrid tea. If you ever want someone on the east coast to test roses, I would be happy to do it.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks, Shane

After about a year Wedding Bells has been entirely blackspot free here. ( and yes Julia Child gets it here too). It did get a touch of mildew on some new tip growth in late autumn, but nothing too bad) I got it bare root last winter, it leafed out wonderfully and seemed to be doing so well in the extreme summer heat that unfortunately I neglected it and left the pot in one of the hotter areas of the back yard and it got badly scorched. So it went into recovery mode, sulked and looked a bit scraggy, although managing to stay disease free until it recovered in late autumn. Only got about two blooms from it, but I'm putting that down to being a late starter (it seemed to want to put out leaves and growth rather than flowers in spring) then the heatstroke incident just as it was gearing up to bloom.

Thanks for the info on Wedding Bells. I think I am going to have to get it.

greenburgroses, glad you cleared that up...lol

You going to spray your new roses with disease spores? Are you saying your introducing different strains of BS to your roses? I'm just wondering why and am a bit confused...lol... I know William Radler did this on his quest for creating new disease resistant roses but otherwse?

jim1961

Yes, I breed roses and yes, I spray them with disease spores that I collect from all over. I would rather find out early on if they are resistant. If one of my roses ever gets released, I would hate for it to be advertised as disease resistant only to find out that it is not.

Got ya ok greenburgroses... But even Knockout is not disease resistant everywhere...But good for you! Awesome! I wish you all the best!

I've had this experience in relation to Earth-Kind roses, too. For example, Marie Daly is full of blackspot in my yard - the only one that has it. Doesn't seem to slow it down much, though. I've heard it does this in other areas; should have checked with local growers first.

Chris and all. I have to make a correction to my post. Savannah does not have BS and is a very clean rose. It was only after they bloomed that I realized the tags had been switched on two roses. I changed the tags on them. I'm sorry if I misled anyone about Savannah.