WELCOME!!! You've come to the right place to save yourself a whole lot of heartache in the rose dept. I used to think that roses didn't do well for me in L.A. Airport adjacent because I didn't spray for fungus regularly enough. After all, what I bought locally should all do well for me, right??? So, so wrong. I learned here, that I just needed to buy roses that are resistant to fungus (we have a VERY heavy mildew burden here). ***I didn't need to spray*** Who knew??? While I honestly don't like to spray for environmental reasons, if I'm going to be honest, I'm not structured enough to do it on the strict schedule required. Something to think about - once the leaves get mildew, you can't 'fix' them. But guess what? There are lots of choices anyway! And, I'm afraid, it's just another area of one's life where one should be a careful consumer at the local store. Of the modern roses, I think you may learn to appreciate florabundas. Very pretty landscape plants, often in your size range. I'd like to suggest Walking On Sunshine. I got it in spring of last year on Jeri's advice and it has been just amazing. About 3' round in our garden and always in bloom. Lovely saturated yellow, but fading to a still lovely creamy yellow that doesn't look faded. Also a nice scent. Wouldn't be without it now. Armstrong's should have it when they get roses in next year. If you have the room (depending on soil), I'd heartily recommend Golden Celebration as well. I call the blooms 'happy blooms' and I really like the smell as well. Your mileage may vary. Depending on your soil, size may vary. When I was LAX adjacent, it never got more than 4' in sandy loam and half day sun. Three miles inland in amended clay, it wants to be 6' tall (or better when the DH fertilizes the adjacent lawn ;-) It's not great in all parts of the country, but here it really shines, imho (and if Jeri agrees, enough said ;-) Lemme see... Our Julia Child was an experiment and I'd get it again. It is tall as the other poster said. It also fades well, not a common trait among yellows. Reminds me of Julia cutting into her favorite food, butter, new ones are like the outside of a stick of butter and older ones are like the inside. There are lots of others we can explore here. The only other advice I'd say is that roses aren't hard if they're the right roses in the right place. In fact, roses are a great hobby/passion and have wonderful history. Just don't get the ones labeled 'red' or 'white' or 'yellow' ;-) Oh, one other thing to think about. I would bet, if you got America late season, that it didn't have mildew because it was sprayed at the producer. Just a thought.

For those who want specifics, here is the response I wrote to an article published several weeks ago by the L.A. Times, an article focusing on water usage in L.A. County: While the article's title is accurate vis-à-vis the facts presented, the information is misleading because the water problem is a statewide one--L.A.'s water sources are principally non-L.A., and, because the state water sources are statewide (and beyond), they are impacted by statewide use, not just L.A. use. Yes, just in L.A., the principal use of water is by single-family households; but this approaches insignificance when you consider that, statewide, approximately 50% of the total water used in the state is for environmental uses, 40% of the total water used is consumed by Agriculture (these figures are given in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California). The remaining 10% is for "all other uses." It is patently unfair that the residential water user is made the whipping boy during droughts when all the reasonable savings a committed homeowner could conceivably make would make no effective difference in relieving the drought. Using figures supplied by the EPA for the nation as a whole, I've been checking some other figures. The "average household" uses (not wastes, but uses) 320 gallons of water a day, which is 116,800 gallons per year (in a 365 day year). They specify that 30% of this represents the household's "outdoor uses." The late Sunset Blvd. incident wasted approximately 20 million gallons. That would have been full water usage by one average household for over 171 years. And yet the water department officials scoff at the significance of this incident (while still scolding residential water users about their habits). Considering outdoor usage by the average household (the 30% mentioned above), the EPA says "as much as" 50% of this is wasted. That would be 48 gallons a day of wastage by the average household, which, in a year, would be 17,520. Let's say that our average householder managed not to waste that 17,520. That's very nice; but it would take over 1141 householders saving that amount to equal what was wasted in the Sunset Blvd. incident. To put it another way, the Sunset Blvd. incident wasted a whole year of strenuous efforts at conservation by over 1141 households. The EPA also supplies a pie chart, dated 2005, of "freshwater withdrawals." Here are the percentages of water usage, in descending order: Thermoelectric power, 41.5% Irrigation, 37% Domestic, 8.5% "Other Publicly Supplied Users," 5.4% Industrial, 5% Aquaculture, 2.6% (They note that mining and livestock account for 1%, which I suppose is part of the Industrial category.) Look at the above, and note that the top two line-items, Thermoelectric Power and Irrigation, account for no less than 76.5% of water usage. Even if one would say that the water used by Thermoelectric Power is then still available afterwards for other uses and so eliminate that category, Domestic (household) use still trails far behind the "final" (i.e., not available for other uses afterwards) usages for combined Irrigation, "Other," Industrial, and Aquaculture. And yet, it is us, "Domestic," with our little 8.5%, which is made the whipping boy during a drought. The Times article about L.A. water use perpetuates a false and unfair perception. Please publish an article presenting a full and more accurate picture. Thank you.

The problem with the Los Angeles plant is that it wasn't in perfect healthy going into winter. It didn't have many leaves to start with. If the experiment fails..you will still wonder if a healthy plant would survive since we have had a extremely mild winter for lows so far. El Nino has bumped up night temps.

Actually the farmers in the middle/west side of the Central Valley were told they would only get 30% of their water this year. They stated that might change but for now, only 30%. I know that the flood district is releasing water from the dams into the canals and ponding basins right now in anticipation of the wet weather to come and the snow melt down the road. I just hope that we are able to get more water back into the aquifer. That is where it is needed as we are literally sinking from over pumping from the ag industry here. We are due for our 200 year flood soon. The last one happened in 1862. Sacramento was under water for six months. There are pictures of the event that shows people getting around downtown Sacramento in row boats! I believe there were several straight days of warm rain that came after heavy snows. That melted the snow and caused the flooding. It was quite the event. They had to move the capital of California from Sacramento to San Fran during this event due to the flooding. We had a disaster drill on it at work last year as a way of prepping for it. The pictures they showed us from it were amazing. We have a lot more ponding basins, canals, they have been building up the levy's, etc., since that time. We just had the person from the water district at our training last week (master gardener training). The pictures of all of the canals, underground systems, ponding basins, etc., was very interesting to show how they move the water around in the city. He spoke to us about that they are already releasing water from the dams and into the canals in preparation for this week's storms. We are not supposed to get hit as hard as Sacto/SF area, so I am sure they are doing the same up there in anticipation. Hope everyone stays safe and drives very carefully over the next week or so.