Hi Kathy Could you post a picture? Canes, leafs and growth can tell a lot about a rose. You can safely prune out old dead wood, and old canes you don't want to keep, but the ones you keep must not be shortened by more than a 1/4, perhaps a 1/3 of the length. When once bloomers get very old and old canes have not regularly been pruned out, they might not take very well to pruning at all. Another thing than can inhibits a rose from forming buds is lack of sunlight. Trees and bushes might have grown too tall or dense over the years, and the rose has ended up in full shade all day. An old neglected rose will all ways respond well to good care, and if you don't do anything else, clean up all weeds around the rose and give it generous amounts of fertilizer. There a lots of brands to choose from, even especially made for roses. If it looks like it needs something extra to get it going, the organic liquid types with seaweed and other good stuff are really good. Give it a few buckets of fertilizer dissolved in water and apply in a fairly large radius, about as far as the roots spread. Moving a rose will set the plant back for a time, and it will probably do much better next year. Good luck with your rose, it probably just needs a bit of care :-)

I have lots of fun googling all the suggestions -- so pretty! I emailed Pat and she replied: that Morning Has Broken is a great yellow, very disease resistant. She hasn't noticed if it has throns. (Can anyone tell me?) And here is a list she gave me of some other light ones that have few thorns or none: Marie Pavie Gruss an Aachen Pink Gruss an Aachen Misty Dawn Echo Lime Sublime I think I am deciding now between Morning Has Broken and Marie Pavie -- which do you think would be better for a no-spraying rose newbie who will probably make a lot of mistakes?

I drove down to the Farm Center today to buy this rose, but they had already closed (darned Daylight Savings time messes with my sense of time). Anyway, I got out and looked through all the roses. They got more in stock. There are three Night Owls left. And then I spotted another rose two pallets over. WOw! It was the most beautiful red I had ever seen! The rose is a large shrub rose called "Hot Cocoa". Oh boy! I am going back tomorrow. If the roses aren't too much, I hope to get two of them and one of the purple Night Owl. If they are too much, I will have to decide. Can a person be FICKLE with a rose??? :) ~Annie

In my admittedly unscientific observations on the fall deadheading, I haven't seen any difference if I deadhead or stop deadheading in the fall as far as winter survival goes. For me, the long cool nights and day length does more to help the rose go dormant than any of my cultivation techniques. The roses that I do or don't deadhead still go on blooming until a couple of hard frosts make them go dormant, since it takes more than a couple of deadheads to make them shut down bloom. As far as I can tell, the growth of basals like Patty mentions seems to be more from pruning than deadheading. I do stop pruning by this time of year so the rose doesn't respond with a burst of growth that's doomed, but I've stopped worrying about not deadheading. I have the potential for a fall flush when it gets cool and for some roses it's the first time they'll bloom all year. I'm not prepared to sacrifice it when it doesn't make any difference that I can see. Cynthia