If leaves and flowers are true to type then it has just finally gotten up enough vigor to grow up out of the shade.

Because it is growing in YOUR garden, Jackie! :-) I had no idea this rose could climb, but I'm learning just how enormous Chinas, Teas and others can become in California over decades. Some of the Teas that Jeri has posted shocked me at first! I've now spotted "modest varieties" like Cecile Brunner (not Spray Cecile) which have grown bigger than expected in their circa 1920s Portland bungalow landscapes. Your garden is akin to a test site for statistics on rose maturity! Your EdB is beautiful, by the way. If you opened your garden to tours, you could raise enough money to save the world. It's positively traffic stopping! Carol

I've been thinking about posting about this. Some otherwise shrubby Teas, if given support and a need to reach light, will climb. I've certainly seen this with 'Archduke Joseph' and 'Mrs. B.R. Cant', but just got the latest manifestation with 'Safrano', a variety I've never suspected of climbing tendencies. It's interesting how they do it. 'Safrano' is growing at the top of a steep slope, overhanging a place I need to walk, so I put up a bamboo-and-rebar structure to hold up the branches. 'Safrano' promptly did what Teas do: it put out a new joint of cane about two feet long (thus frustrating my intention) but getting it further out toward the sun. These jointed canes are fascinating. The new length of cane is rigid, but the joint is flexible, enough so that the cane can even drop down vertically from a point of support. I suspect Embothrium is right.

Maybe your extraordinarily wet winter helped it to put out enough roots to encourage it to grow tall seeking the light. Maybe there finally was enough water for everybody so they didn't compete too much..

Drip irrigation or even watering in a watering hole, which are my two means of watering plants here can sustain a rose but they never encourage it to spread its roots far especially when there's fierce competition. Instead, they have the opposite effect of inviting competing roots near where the rose gets its drink.

60+ inches of rain will do it.

Thank you all - roses are amazing, and I guess I should not be surprised that one of the only "short" roses in my garden has gotten the climbing bug!

Jackie

Some of my teas climb; Mme Joseph Schwartz and Mme Bravy are a couple that come to mind. Both get enough sun I think. I've attributed this to heat and no cold.

We have winters here, but of the Mediterranean, steadily chilly kind (enough winter chill for cherries and tulips), not with temperatures low enough to damage Teas. They climb just the same.

I'm no expert or anything, lol. I have noticed a few of my roses (not teas but not a cl version either) decided they want to climb once they got up against something they could climb. I have had Blue Girl for years. It was large but never a climber. Then because it was in a really large pot and got bigger on one side than the other and was kinda tilting, I moved it up against a really tall shrub for balance until I could get to pruning it. Well I didn't get to it for awhile and next thing you know, it had one branch that got really long and was around 10ft. I trimmed it back and it shot out again and now basically is a climber on that side.

Poseidon is a newer rose for me. I got it from Heirloom as a band. It seemed like a shrub. Everyone else seems to have a shrub and I haven't heard that there is a climbing version. Mine was a shrub until last summer when I stuck it up against a trellis because I was moving stuff around. Next thing you know it was 10ft up and on top of that trellis, on a few branches. I cut them back. They grew back. Now one is 12ft and still growing. It has a few new ones that are close to 8ft so far. Both these bushes are in full sun so they aren't reaching for the sun -just the moon lol.