Reines has bloomed! :) It smells so wonderful! Ingrid, I have 2 antiques and then an Easy Does It, Strike it Rich, 2 knock outs and a tea rose. First year they're all in the ground so it's taking longer for them to bloom but so much fun coming home each day and seeing what treat my garden has in store. :)

If you want to eliminate all blackspot, you will have to use a fungicide. Bayer Garden Disease Control (but NOT one of their combo types--read the labels carefully) is excellent, but is usually made up in a 2 gal. container. Do you need that much? If not, Daconil comes in a smaller ready-mix spray bottle. It is good, but not as good as the Bayer product. The reason you are not getting a strongly affirmative response is that spraying is a highly controversial topic. It may not be good for your health or for the environment--it may kill off some "good" bugs that you want in your garden. On the other hand, it is approved for use in the home garden (in which case, follow directions carefully). So you have to make up your own mind which way you want to go. Sometimes a rose gets a limited case of BS, so rather than spraying, many gardeners just tolerate the less than perfect leaves and pick them off (dispose in garbage, not in the compost pile) as they turn yellow. You don't want to pick off green leaves, if possible, because the plant gets its energy from the sun through the green leaves. I try to limit my spraying to a couple times in the spring and a couple times in the fall--the two periods of time most conducive to the formation of BS. Some gardeners spray every 2 weeks all season. Other gardeners refuse to spray under any conditions. In your case, I'd try first plucking off the yellow BS leaves and see if that is enough to get the problem under control. But if it kept on spreading and getting worse, then I'd use Bayer Garden Disease Control twice (about a week or 10 days a part). Kate

Polina, Volumes have been written to answer your last paragraph. ;Arthurm, you think they will give me enough room here to try? It used to be that there were two types of really expensive orchids. One group was rare, very hard to find plants that were brought out of the wild and only a very few of them were in cultivation any where in the world. The others were those plants that had been hybridized by man over sometimes many generations to create exceptionally shaped blooms, or blooms with exceptional color, or both. These plants had been shown to highly trained judges who were accredited by recognized organizations such as the Royal Horticultural Society of England, or the American Orchid Society, and granted awards recognizing their superiority. When two orchids are crossed (pollen from one applied to the stigma of the other) a seed pod may be formed that can contain nearly a million almost microscopic seeds. If these seeds are planted on a nutrient material (agar, something near the consistency of Jell-O) in a sterile environment (to prevent mold contamination), each seed can produce a baby plant. Each of these little plants are unique...some will resemble mom, some dad, and most will be somewhere in between. Some may inherit and exhibit a trait from some ancestor many generations back. After about 7 years these plants will begin to bloom, and experienced growers pick the finest ones out of the multitude of first blooming seedlings. These plants are usually allowed to bloom once or twice more to confirm their characteristics before they are entered in shows or taken to judgings. Once the plants begin to bloom, the cross can be named. The process looks like this...Cattleya Plant A X (crossed by) Laelia Plant B = Laeliocattleya John Doe. (Lc. John Doe must never have been registered before) Now all these little plants that came out of that seed pod have the same name. If, in America one of those selected little plants is taken to a show, and the American Orchid Society judges there agree that it is exceptional, they can award it. Lets say they give it an Award of Merit. Now, the owner has the right to give that individual plant a "clonal name"...It now might become Laeliocattleya John Doe Variety 'My Best' AM/AOS. Now, that one particular plant has been singled out as better than its siblings, and has a name that defines it from all its siblings. Before Cloning was perfected, the only way you could obtain a plant of LC John Doe Var. "My Best" AM/AOS would be to purchase it from the owner. That usually would not happen, but the owner might consent to selling you a division or part of the plant once it grew large enough to be divided. I have personally seen divisions sold for as high as $3,000.00. Once cloning was perfected, a piece of our pant in question could be taken into the lab, and multiplied many hundreds of times, producing exact genetic copies of the original plant, and now, blooming sized plants of this plant can be purchased for $15 - $20.00. If you wanted to, you could purchase at very reasonable prices two plants with excellent breeding records, cross them, wait for them (7 yrs.) to begin to bloom, and if your cross had not been registered previously, you could name the cross, and take the best of the bunch to shows and see if you could get them awarded, clone (could probably begin to sell plants in flasks in about 2 years) them and make your fortune selling them. Kinda changes a fun hobby into lots of hard work, doesn't it. Bill

Flowersaremusic, I followed your advice and that of others who suggested similar and I poured the dirt back into my unwisely dug hole. In general, I am not one for placing "the fine and the well-bred" in the middle of tough competition, mainly because such competition may employ "dirty" methods which 'the fine' have not been bred to resort to. :) This is why we all them roses, I guess - to be pampered and protected for their beauty. Plus, at this stage in my ...rose interest (OK, obsession) - I'd rather not experience too many setbacks. Even though I know, theoretically, that this is just learning and experimenting, I am too inexperienced for this. I need some successes to gain good momentul and to make my few bushes (6-7) provide enough bloom so I can also enjoy a few cut flowers indoors once in a while. Last summer when we were out of the country for 3 months and my roses were left to fend for themselves - I almost gave up when I saw how they looked upon return. Good as Gold was so eaten by black spot that eventually it lost ALL of it foliage. He is already giving signs this year that he will get it again, but then I will be hear to fuss over it. If he hangs onto that black spot, he will get the shovel pruning treatment and in the fall someone else will replace him. Trouble is he is my only hybrid tea and I wonder if I will ever be able to find one HT that is resistant to black spot in my area. Floribundas are wonderful in terms of bloom number, but it looks like the bloom size is rather small compared to hybrids. I have not had a floribunda so far, so I am looking forward to their performance this year.