odinthor... ...yes, the water is very much still here, in the Fens where I am... surrounded by rivers, streams, ditches and dykes... and a fair bit of flooding in winter, however further south and east in East Anglia, in the counties of Essex and Suffolk, water is scarcer and it can be quite dry, the driest parts of this country. ...Even here in the northern section with the Fens, we have had little rain this year, except a couple of nights ago when we had electric storms and what seemed like 2 inches of rain in about an hour.... to make up for the 97 degrees we got the other day... this rainfall was manna from heaven for me, as I've been watering my garden with the hose since March... ...obviously, this doesn't compare with drought in other areas but it can be difficult here to get things established.. ..Darlow's Enigma doesn't appeal to me at all as a rose I'd want to grow, but I would also like to know its real name, out of curiosity... ..oh I've just checked on HMF... 'Cascadia' [1922] is thought to be the true identity... Madame d'Arblay x Bloomfield Abundance... that's quite a nice name I think....

Gorgeous picture of John Cabot, flowersaremusic! Mine hasn't decided if it will survive or not but given your photos I am going to whisper sweet nothings in its ears all winter and hope for good things come spring. Sorry I missed the earlier questions about Wilhelm, Vaporvac. I got mine from Vintage so it's not an option now of course, but I know I've seen him elsewhere since (maybe High Country Roses or Hortico). I don't want to get rid of mine - far the contrary - but I'm afraid he's being crowded out by the more aggressive Heavenly Pink and he's down to a single cane. Until he recovers more fully I'm afraid to take cuttings of him at all. Ratdogheads, Francesca is one of those hybrid musks that has limped along for me in zone 5, but it's not in an ideal spot so don't overly judge it there. It's planted under some limbed up pine trees so the ground can get a bit dry. Heavenly Pink and Darlow's Enigma thrive there, but some hybrid musks like Francesca and Cornelia and Clytemnestra hung on with a few scattered flowers for a few years before two of the three fading (Cornelia is still hanging in there). I've planted some of the less hardy HMusks in my warm zone 6 area like Prosperity to get a better response. As for Danae, I had several copies of her as a mystery plant from RV and they all summarily died over the winter in various places, so I'd say she's not hardy in zone 5 at all. Ghislaine de Feligonde survives fine but is a once bloomer for me and not many blooms at that. Guirlande d'Amour blooms quite nicely if you like that look and it's pretty hardy. Buff Beauty survived a few years in a different spot before dying overwinter and I quite like the flowers. It died pretty quickly in this tough spot, so this year it gets the warm spot as a preferred rose. I think Francesca has a chance for you in a decent spot and perhaps give it a little extra mulch or something for winter protection. You get more reliable snow cover than we do, so that helps your roses even if the weather itself is colder. Cynthia

Zone 9b, Newhall, CA, mid California desert. Darlow's Enigma grew on the north side of an enormous Mexican Elderberry which I constantly hacked on to keep it from eating the rose beds around it. Darlow's was evergreen and it flowered nearly year round. The most severe year that canyon bottom saw in its 18 years of existence, had a 100 degree temperature range, from 15 F to 115 F. Darlow grew there then and there were never any issues with it. In that position, it never received ANY direct sun, only filtered and reflected sun and light.

Pruning cuts off food making leaves, so that isn't something you want to be doing now. However . . . . Given what your goal is, I seriously doubt that Darlow's Enigma is the rose you want. It will naturally grow into a bushy shrub form, but that shrub is 12 ft tall. It isn't a climber in any usual sense of the term. Pruning makes it grow denser, but then you have an incredibly tangled mess of interlocked (by the thorns) canes, which are almost impossible to detangle when the canes die from abrasion. For many years, most of my pruning of this rose has been trying to thin it out.