Again, ELISA, when properly done, is 100% effective, and has never once, in the 30-ish years we've used it, failed to give an accurate analysis. This is considering the following: 1. We always enclose "blind" samples of known infected and known uninfected tissue -- blind to the lab -- and unless the results come back with them correctly identifying all of those, we would not believe their results on our unknowns. That assures that virus titer is in a usable range on the day the test was done. In actual fact, in all those years, they (WSU Prosser's ELISA lab) have NEVER gotten one wrong, even once. Pretty good record. 2. Once that's done and a rose is "certified" clean (notice that ELISA is just one of the tripod of tests we run -- they're also tested with 'Mme. Butterfly' and 'Shirofugen' cherry -- all 3 must come out unambiguously clean) -- no rose once certified in that way has EVER later been found to have rose mosaic. Not one. Not ever. Not even in cold climates where all the intelligent people live. On rare occasions, the lab has said a test was somewhat ambiguous, and in those cases, we ignored all of the results from that run, and re-ran them later. 3. While we use the three tests for redundancy, we've never seen a case in which one test came out positive while the others came out negative -- in 100% of the roses I've ever tested, all three methods have agreed on their result. So obviously, the point of this long, drawn-out discussion with all kinds of complaints, is moot -- there is no problem here. We have no problem at all identifying where the disease is. No evidence to the contrary has been presented here. I would like to say that you can't argue with absolute 100% success, but obviously, there is one person who is determined to argue continuously with absolute 100% success! So yes, I'm just working our way toward the 150 posts mark, and hoping to keep us focused on the real issues, rather than being constantly drawn into perfectly silly little side arguments that are in and of themselves without merit.

Wow, Anne. I got to check out Dorothy Perkins, a fantastic once-bloomer that occasionally has a tiny bit of rebloom and is zone appropriate 4b and upward. The once-bloomer Turner's Crimson was also very lively. These must be great weepers/standards, I love their photos on HMF. Unfortunately I didn't know at the time that my hybrid tea tree roses I chose were actually zone 7b and they had fragile genes as well. But the great thing was that they bloomed like crazy no matter the condition of their foliage. I think the major difference is that the Burlington tree roses spend the winter in the greenhouse where there is light and warmth and can be carried back & forth. Mine stayed in the dungeon of my garage with no light and they were not carried back and forth if we ever got a warmer break in the weather. Not that this would have helped that much because our winter remained record-breaking cold anyway. But even a little bit of light and fresh air in February through March might have helped the tree roses a lot! Instead I waited until it was "safe" to bring them out. But I also think that non-stop rains are detrimental to my tree roses. The canker always starts right at the bud-union and spreads upwards on the stem or simultaneously down to the bud union and it always occurs when we get slammed with flooding rainstorms. This drives me crazy! If the canker had started on the upper portion of the stems, it would be a piece of cake to solve (you can easily prune and cut). But invading the bud union from the get-go is absolutely maddening! Next year when I restart my tree roses I will definitely carry them in and out of the garage more frequently and I will also start my severe pruning in winter instead of waiting until Spring. Veilchen, I checked David Austin's tree roses but the only ones they had were Austins and not the Old Garden Roses. Maybe one of these days David Austin will carry them perhaps? that would be nice.

Vaporvac, you're right, the google listing does say "permanently closed". I didn't even look at the listing, just the search results. The last post on the Facebook page is from 2013, and like I said earlier, the website has been unfinished and "under construction" since 2014. Obviously, their customer "non-service" cost them their business.

trends and fashions, mariannese. At the moment, everything here is 'grow your own' with a sideshow of tropicals, prairie planting and ornamental grasses. A quick look in any bookstore will illuminate where the money is going in gardening - design is god. Not only nurseries, the horticultural trade as a whole is going through one of those reinvention moments. many colleges have downsized, teaching fewer modules in plant husbandry, nursey stock, even basic gardening, in favour of quick, money-spinning design courses. Everyone wants to be a bloody designer (We are....and we have seen some absolute cowboys who know NOTHING about plants). There are less apprenticeships. less facillities and many councils, parks and colleges no longer grow their own plants - they merely buy them in cheaply, two or three times a year, from massive greenhouses in the Netherlands. Therefore, the perceived need for knowledge and experience is receding while the nursey trade is vastly over-capitalised - almost impossible to get a small start-up going now. In the UK, the rose trade has largely been fairly steady although Beales, our foremost old rose grower, was in financial difficulties last year and have been forced to look at new ways to generate revenue (teaching courses, expanding the product range, taking on franchises selling garden structures and so on). However, I cannot help but feel quite optimistic for the longer term since roses have been around for hundreds of years while the same cannot be said about restios, bananas, echinacea and miscanthus and the rest of the fashionable plants. Moreover, in a time of anxiety and fear, people invariably fall back into nostalgia and conservative thinking....and there is nothing so redolent of english gardening as a rose. Individuals, sadly, will fall by the wayside and it may be that, for a time, we are dependent on amateurs and a few larger firms to supply us. However, these plants are out there - they are not going away and if the gardening world seriously addressed the issue of failing sales, they would be forced to engage in some imaginative thinking and address some of the many issues which troublwe people who would grow roses if they did not use so much water, pesticides and fertilisers...a matter of education and breaking down artificial barriers to full understanding. Not only that, breeders are also keen to address these troubling problems such as health and vigour, the way roses are planted within a larger scheme and the general good value of planting long-flowering shrubs - we will see a lot more ground-covering/landscape roses which, to my mind, will be a good thing as I am heartily sick of hebes and lonicera, aucuba and bloody skimmia - our usual municipal plantings. The rose industry is not dead or even slightly ill - it is just changing...and a good thing too.