What an uplifting report, Jerome. I have four out of six you recommend. I'll have to add Old Town and Forest Ranch. Your choices are great here too. This really helps pass the info around. Thanks for thinking of us, even though you are really busy. I hope you get some rose time in this Summer.

This post makes me want to try a few more hybrid perpetuals! Old Town Novato looks gorgeous.

Welcome back Jerome! You MUST get Vick's Caprice. I love this HP. He is such a charmer. New for me this year are Yolande, Marchesa Boccella and Portland from Glendora. Here is a picture of Vick's Caprice.

Burling has a fair amount of HP's. They do great in my climate.

Jerome, if we ask nicely can you post some pictures of your spring flush? It would be awesome to see the garden again after all this time.

For some reason I had always had the idea that hybrid perpetuals, other than Grandmother's Hat, were not really suited to our climate. However did I get that idea?

Vick's Caprice is spectacular, and that is a fantastic photo, mustbnuts. I'm surprised that it has such poor ratings on helpmefind.

Ingrid, Vick's takes some time to come into his own. I have him on own root and for many a year, he was threatened with extinction from my garden. Then he would slyly give me a bloom to die for. Oh, what a tease!

I also am learning how to (or more correctly, how not to) prune a HP. That, his age, improvement in my gardening skills (plus he does like compost and fertilizer and a tiny bit of shade in the afternoon when it is 116 degrees out--but then don't we all?) has just made him a winner in my yard. He is covered with buds at the moment. He also made a couple of hips last year that I will hopefully grow from seed one of these days. I think he and Mary Magdalene may have gotten together as they are right next to each other and that is where the hip was. Who knows? I was lucky to get a hip from her as well (same spot) last year too. I have never seen a hip on him until this last year.

He is a charmer and a cad at the same time. Can you tell that I just adore him? He has NO disease or fungal issues in my garden at all. Takes heat well considering it is hotter than Hades here and he is next to a stone border and a cement patio, plus he faces west and gets the brunt of the sun in the afternoon.

His sepals are also to die for! They are the longest (and most charming) I have ever seen.

It's nice to hear from you, Jerome. Like Ingrid, I thought that HP's, as a group, weren't really adapted too much to hot climates. I'm gonna re-think that, lol !

I’m glad to see you posting! I’m bookmarking your list, since I’m in S CA , as well. I’ve been very happy with Baronne Prevost. It’s been great here! Lisa

Sorry for my delayed response. Been running around all day and have about 3 minutes to try and respond. It's great to be back. Thank you each one for your kind words! I don't want to mislead anyone here. There have been some Hy Perps which were real stinkers here and just plain died on me. Fr. Ambrose insisted we get Ferdinand Pichard (I don't like striped roses, but it's not all about me, so we got it). It was miserable and died. I read somewhere that Ferdinand Pichard has a lot of Bourbon in it, so that makes sense...Bourbons are horrible here and they've all been removed except for Mystic Beauty (a tougher sport of Souvenir de la Malmaison). Vick's Caprice looks lovely! I'll look into it for the new place.

Ingrid, I'll try to post photos soon. My computer doesn't play well with me for uploading photos somehow, and rather than try again and have to go to confession, I'll log into Houzz from the phone and upload it that way. I promise to try to upload soon. I have one pretty photo of GH, and I need to get out and take photos of La Reine in a few days, because she's about to go ballistic.

Jeri, your GH is GORGEOUS! We prune ours rather hard, like an Austin, and don't let it get much over 6' x 5' at it's greatest summer height. Right now it's about 5'5" high. Spring flush is the best for us, but she repeats reliably all summer. And the fragrance....OMG.

Ok. Wow! I figured out how to upload! Here's Grandmother's Hat from a few days ago. This has a really bad perspective, because it was taken from above and doesn't give a good idea of the size of the bush. Obviously, it's a lot smaller than Jeri's behemoth, but we keep it pretty severely pruned to keep it in bounds. Okay, time to get to my next appointment.

Here's La Reine coming off first flush in 2015...I'll get present photos in a few days when it goes into full flush.

Great pictures! Grandmother's Hat is such a charming rose. I love how her blooms are slightly tousled.

Good to hear from you, Father Jerome!

You listed just about all the HPs that I found to do well in my part of California - maybe add in Sydonie and Glendora. I tried a number of others and they were consistently cholorotic. (Actually I had that problem with Forest Ranch Pompom as well.) Perhaps it is a function of my soil or microclimate, but I eventually just stopped exploring. I do like the HPs and wanted to have more.

I do think it is not a coincidence that our lists overlapped. Geography at work.

Plumeria Girl, the white rose in the back of La Reine is a gigantic tea rose called "Le Pactole"...great rose, tough as nails, blooms a ton...what's not to love?!

I will answer some of the other comments/questions tonight...gotta dash now

Good to see you back, Jerome! Sounds like you have a busy life.

I vaguely remembered in the 'Vintage Garden Book of Roses' mention of what a heterogenous group the Hybrid Perpetuals are, with my assumption (and perhaps theirs) following that some sub-categories of HPs will like a given situation and others not. The HPs overlap in some directions with the Hybrid Damasks, which include the Portlands, and in others they go off to rub shoulders with the Hybrid Teas. There may be lineages with dominant characteristics. I'm no expert on the group (unlike the authors of the VGBOF; I definitely need to reread their chapter on Hybrid Perpetuals).

Another unknown is one gardener's micro-conditions: are mine like Jerome's, or rosefolly's, or bart's? We have generally heavy clay soil, hot dry summers, wet chilly winters, lots of sun in the big garden. I know, for example, that Gallicas, Albas, and other once-flowering old roses do pretty well here; R. hugonis, rugosas, species from the eastern U.S. keel over, partly because they're susceptible to cane girdler; Bourbons tend, as in Jerome's garden, to be fairly consistently failures; Teas will thrive IF the soil can be lightened sufficiently, which is not easy--I'm still grieving over the loss of a magnificent 'Anna Jung' years ago which fell victim to drowning--and, here I come to the point, roses with a strong Damask character do quite well here, however they're classed. Damask-y roses that are happy here include the following varieties:

'Reine des Violettes', grafted and ownroot

'Marchesa Boccella'/'Jacques Cartier', ownroot

'Enfant de France', ownroot, Portland-like upright habit

'Rose de Rescht', ownroot and grafted

'Rose du Roi', grafted, don't know exactly what this is, but it's distinctly Portland-ish and happy

a couple of nameless low-growing once-flowering suckering Damask-y mosses, lovely roses

'Mme. Louis Leveque', grafted and ownroot, received as 'Gloire des Mousseux', which I think is wrong. This is a reblooming Portland-style Moss.

I have quite a few more out in a newish area, but have lost all the labels and need to go out with my book and stick the names on them again. I do have a general impression that many of the Damask-y types are particularly strong and happy.

This isn't to say that all the other Hybrid Perpetuals are doomed here. I just planted out a cutting-grown rose that looks like a Hybrid Tea-leaning HP. The parent plant had a young elm growing through the middle of it but was still blooming valiantly, and I have high hopes for the child. It's still a baby, but it has beautiful foliage. There are others.

One of the problems with evaluating roses in my garden is that many were planted in grossly inadequately prepared holes; and we also have areas of soil that don't seem to respond to any amount of amendment. I don't know what's going on there. So if a rose does poorly, is it because the variety is weak? because the soil is just too awful? or because the rose is in a spot that doesn't suit it, but might do fine in another part of the garden, or a different garden entirely?

Questions, questions.

I don't know how my soil would compare to yours, Melissa. We do have clay here, but it is far from homogenous, and quality varies from area to area at the abbey. I don't know why we have this "patchwork" of soil types, perhaps it is because our current property is riddled with landslides, and that may have juxtaposed different soil types next to each other. We are moving to the new place in later 2020, and it will be interesting to see how the conditions there (eight mile distance from our current place) differ from where we live now.

Plumeria - thanks for your kind words about my GH.

Some photos: Forest Ranch Pompom

Old Town Novato

La Reine

More photos soon...I gotta dash to Vespers now.

Look at all those buds on La Reine! That is going to be spectacular in a short while.

Yes that La Reine is lovely. How old is she?

Jerome, your HP's are drop dead gorgeous and obviously very happy, and probably rather giddy from all that lovely rain. I wonder whether they prefer clay soil over my lean decomposed granite, although in truth I haven't tried HP's here. The teas like it quite a bit here and you say they love your garden, so perhaps one or two might prosper here too. The one I would most likely want to try is Grandmother's Hat or one of its sports. Portland of Glendora did very well for me in a previous garden.

I love that foliage.

Jerome, thank you for the garden update, the roses are so beautiful.

I love Hybrid Perpetuals, and yours are delightful, so many buds and blooms...

I can imagine how wonderful the fragrance must be!

Thanks for all the lovely comments! The La Reine here is about 9 years old. It's on its own roots and suckers quite a bit...though not as aggressively as Rose de Recht.

Thanks for sharing. Your garden is beautiful. I love La Reine. But I am afraid to try hps here.

Will you take your roses to the new abbey?

Totoro, we'll bring some of them to the new abbey for sure...others it's not possible. I've got a Miss Atwood that's about 14' high and maybe 16' wide. You'd need an earthmover to get it out, and I don't know if a rose that size would survive a transplant. To be honest, I'm burying my head in the sand about this moving to the new place. It's going to be a bittersweet experience: our current site is woefully inadequate for our needs, but it's been home for 33 years now, and it will be very emotional leaving it.