Poodlepup, When you or any of us are trying to diagnose diseases, we need to look for multiple symptoms. Red color isn't even a failsafe diagnosis of RRD; some OGRs never show the red color at all when they are sick with it. RRD has symptoms that are sometimes really blatent, but other times are more subtle. An example is when infected leaves have margins that are different from the pattern of uninfected (same cultivar) leaves. Sometimes the leaves shapes change and the symmetry is lost. Stipules may be hugely overgrown- a stipule on a healthy rose may end up with crazy dentitions when the rose is sick.

I've been trying to dig up 'La Reine' for years. It keeps coming back. This winter I tried really hard to get all the roots, and now...'La Reine' is re-sprouting with enthusiasm yet again. Do not worry about the health of this rose (just the health of the foliage).

This is a fun and very enlightening discussion folks! Your story about New Dawn, Kim, seems to support the notion that the extent to which hips interfere with a rose's blooms depend on the "energy" reserves that the rose has to draw upon. Tough as nails roses like Knockout (as Michael mentioned) or the roses Jackie and Zack mentioned have such a reservoir of health and energy that hips are unlikely to affect them much in any climate unless something else interferes with their vitality. Notorious wimps like Tom Brown or Grey Pearl might be killed by one hip any time anywhere, assuming they set any in the first place. In your story of New Dawn, it sounds like the rose was able to build up a greater store of energy reserves in a climate pattern more to its liking, and therefore the hips affected it to a much lesser extent. I was wondering a related question to Michael's - is every rose hip that spontaneously appears on a bush pollinated so as to produce viable seed, and could it matter that you are deliberately trying to get your roses "pregnant" in your breeding efforts, which might take more energy for the rose than a random hip popping up here and there. I'm thinking of the analogy of chickens, and I don't know if it applies here. When chickens have a set of fertilized eggs, they shift all their energies from laying new eggs to brooding and caring for the bunch. The unfertilized eggs that we eat are expected to be "ever-blooming", however, every day or two. I imagine that you're also leaving the hips on the rose far longer than the random hips I encounter, which also makes a difference as you've already said in the recycle rate. Related to your squirrel comment, would it help to tie a netting or panty hose segment over the crosses to keep it on the bush even if the critters mess with it? Exhibitors seem to do something of the sort for show blooms. I could totally see me getting manic if a cross that I've waited years to develop got carried off by a witless tree rat that didn't really want to eat it anyway, and buried it somewhere in my neighbor's yard! Thanks for the enlightenment, everyone! Cynthia

Nik, the brush killers are you mention indeed more effective against poison oak (and its evil cousin poison ivy east of the Rocky Mountains) than RoundUp is. My DH Tom is an amateur radio enthusiast and he has a couple of retractable antenna towers in the back part of the property, one in the midst of a bed of roses and the other further back outside the fence behind an old stable. We had that area out in the back cleared of poison oak with a Bobcat (small bulldozer) about ten years ago so he would be able to work there. Now it is just the new sprouts and bird seedings that I must work against. RU works fine for that tender growth, and as Catspa explained, it is less persistent in the environment, which is my reason for choosing it. If I did not work on the poison oak every year it would right back to where it was very quickly. Much of this area is a steep hillside, barely walkable, though it is level where the tower is. This is one of the places I have been planting trees. So far in this area two Quercus douglasi (blue oak), three Pinus sabiniana (ghost pine), a Pinus ponderosa (ponderosa pine), Cupressus arizonica 'Blue Ice' (Arizona cypress 'Blue Ice'), Pinus brutia eldarica (Afghan pine), and a Cedrus deodar (deodar cedar) have survived and even thrived, though a number of my earlier attempts failed. It is brutal out there, and I won't water past the second year. Well, maybe one or two waterings for a couple years longer in a really bad drought year. I think I could squeeze in one or two more trees, and perhaps I will, but I will wait a while. Because of our low rainfall, trees must be spaced well apart so that each has its own area from which to pull water. I'm just grateful that we have enough water to grow trees. I love them as much as I love roses. I don't kid myself that these trees will suppress poison oak altogether even when they are grown because poison oak is quite a shade tolerant plant. However it probably would not get enough light to form a solid six-foot-high thicket like the one that was here before. As for the vast ocean of shoulder-high milk thistles, my thought is that if I can spray enough to keep any from going to seed, we will eventually exhaust the seed bank that has built up in the soil. I hope that is true. We have already switched from discing for fire prevention to mowing, so we aren't stirring up the seeds anymore. And it is less shade tolerant than the poison oak is, so I am hopeful about shade suppression as well. I call my garden 'Hundred Roses' as a play on the name of the town of Thousand Oaks in the southern part of the state. But it has quite recently occurred to me that I could just as easily have called it 'Two Towers' in honor of Tom's antenna towers. Rosefolly