cjrosaphile, I was looking at OOTN just yesterday--I've been planning to shovel prune it, but of course now it's covered with buds that look like they might open. I'm trying to decide if I should give it just one more year. I hate it when they turn beautiful just when you're ready to give them the axe! If yours looks this bad too, maybe they just don't like the PNW & I should go ahead and make room for someone else. I gave Golden Buddha away, and I haven't been sorry at all. Looking at the pictures on HMF, it looks like it's just an orange rose. There's a photo of a 4-year-old mature plant---lots of blooms, but plain and orange. If that's what you're looking for, great, but it didn't work for me. I am loving Louisa Stone. She was just planted this spring, so she's not even established. She still has blooms--a little haggard looking since she has gotten practically no water in the past 2 months of record high temperatures, but the plant looks healthy and shows no sign of disease. It'll be interesting to see how she gets thru the winter. I've put in a couple other Harkness roses (Jacqueline DuPre & International Herald Tribune) and have more on order--Harkness looks like a breeder whose roses do well in my yard. I have a bunch more roses coming in the next couple of weeks (had to hit that Ashdown final sale), so anybody that's borderline might get the axe when I find out just how much I've over-bought for the space I have! Another reason to buy more roses--it pushes you to get rid of those that don't really work. Maybe I should get just a couple more...

I'm guessing by the "bulb" you mean the hip, which is the seed pod. Here are a couple of articles from Paul Barden's web site: Germinating Rose Seeds by Dr. Manners My Rose Seed Starting Method (1996-97 Season) by Henry Kuska. Also, go over to the Rose Propagation and Exchange forum, scroll down and search for "seeds". Note that your plants are hybrids. Which means that what you get from the seeds may or may not (not, usually) look like the plant that produced the seeds. The only way to reproduce your plants is propagating via cuttings (you can search for that on the Rose Prop forum too). Enjoy!

Thank you, Jim and Cottagegarden for reviving this thread. I really appreciate the company of kind, and positive visitors to this forum. Like Cottagegarden, I bought 2 soil-test kits from local stores: Lowe and HomeDepot. They are totally useless and gave false result. Then I paid $20 for EarthCo. (professional soil-testing company) and my soil test came back high pH at 7.7, and deficient in everything, plus barely adequate in calcium ... I was so sure that my soil has plenty of calcium !! I'm next to a limestone quarry. For years I disagree with my neighbor on calcium. He insisted that his tomato in pots are lacking in calcium (blossom end-rot) ... He's right, after seeing how mixing gypsum (calcium sulfate) into the soil made 1st-year band-size La Reine went beserk with buds: due to winter-kill, it's only 8 inch. tall, but with 10 buds !! But the plant is stunt & brown leaves, and the blooms are small. I forgot to give it sulfate of potash (it should be twice more potassium than calcium). Yes to mixing gypsum into planting hole, but no more than 10% (I spent hours researching on the right % to mix in). I broke that rule many times, and end up with stunt plants & leaves showing potassium deficiency. Too much calcium drives down potassium. If you have a large garden, soil can vary: some part can be alkaline if watered frequently with high pH tap water. Most tap water are alkaline, I already tested a few with fish-tank litmus paper, even mineral bottled water has pH over 8. Some part of a garden can be acidic (if get rain water only, pH at 5.6). My soil test recommend mixing sulfur into clay. BAD ADVICE !! That was expensive and killed tons of earthworms. I like gypsum better, less caustic & cheaper ($4 for 25 lb. at Menards). Gypsum is great in breaking up compacted clay, provides calcium, plus de-salt soil. I moved 4 roses this spring: The ones that didn't get gypsum in the planting hole were slower to recuperate. The one that got gypsum in the planting hole, was VERY FAST in pumping out buds. See Duchess de Rohan below, 2 weeks after moving, with lots of buds. I moved that one since it was in too much shade, zero blooms. After moving to more sun, it exploded in buds. A note on moving roses. Roses which are grafted on Dr. Huey is less forgiving in moving. Dr. Huey is a long stick, and it's easy to break the tiny roots at the end. I moved knock-outs grafted on Dr. Huey twice before. Both time they lost all their leaves, and took at least 3 months to get back to normal. With own-root, it's so much easier to move: The roots are cluster: wide & shallow, rather than a long & deep stick like Dr. Huey. I moved at least 10 own-roots for the past 4 years: They recuperate quickly, lose zero leaves, IF THE ORIGINAL SOIL IS LOOSE & FLUFFY, then moving is zero stress. If the original soil is compact, digging them up caused many roots to be broken.

So you def love Awakening! Do you have experience with New Dawn? I don't know if I'd pick Awakening again because I think there are better roses out there, and she is so very thorny. OTOH - she's healthy, doesn't black spot, and doesn't require much intervention on my part. I think I might just get a welding apron and some leather gloves though just to make pruning her easier. I don't think I'd have it on a porch if I had children, so now the pain she inflicts is more of an amusing novelty for visitors. On still another hand, she has a good fragrance (Apples) to me and since that and blackspot resistance are my two biggies she's been a good rose. As to rebloom I haven't found this rose to ever really stop and it has a good flush in the spring. I do not really keep up on deadheading, really I just rip old roses off as I walk by. If I had to pick again, I might go with a rambler in that spot and weave in a different climbing plant for later flower. An additional consideration for me was winter hardiness. I live outside of Phila in the last bit of zone 7a, and, in my opinion, we still get the occasional zone 6b winter. May of my other plants are protected by a long hedge which I've found further insulates my plants and helps maintain the temperature in the rear garden but the climbing roses climb above that protection. I'm not a woman who will go out and bury my rose canes in the ground (I have a fig tree that's on its own in the winter some years we get fruit, some years it regenerates from the base). So in additional to all I've written above I also wanted to consider a tough plant that would shrug off ice storms and the occasional freeze to 0º.