About your other question, I think Chamblee, Roses Unlimited or David Austin are all first-rate nurseries and I would not hesitate to order from any of them. My personal preference is for Roses Unlimited, but I don't know if I have a good reason for that preference. I just love opening their boxes and seeing the roses already in bloom. On the other hand, I have to wait until after mid-May to get them--which is 3-4 weeks later than I usually plant, at the latest, my other roses. It is very upsetting to discover RRD in your garden--it's happened three different times in a three year period in my gardens, but fortunately only one plant per year--but still, that is upsetting. I'm no RRD expert, but I don't think you need to worry very much about plants close by "catching" the disease. If the wind blew the mites off of the roses that got RRD, it probably blew those tiny, tiny critters half-way into the next county, not a couple feet away to the next rose. At least in my garden, the roses near by the infected rose never exhibited RRD symptoms. The next year when another rose came down with RRD, it was way on the other side of the back yard. Same thing with the third year when a third rose broke out in symptoms--way far away from the two previous ones. I don't know where my disease-causing mites are blowing in from since I live in the middle of a small town, but I'm assuming it is from the wild stuff growing outside of town, not from other roses in my garden--since I immediately get rid of any infected rose in my garden. As the other posters noted, spraying will not help the problem. As upsetting as RRD is, I think you should just go ahead with your garden plans, assuming everything will be all right--since there is not much you can do about RRD other than destroying the infected plants. Good luck. Kate

Drooping canes don't just happen. Either the roots that support them were being eaten by bugs or rodents or the weight of the excessive growth out at the end of the cane was more than that rose stem could support. Over on Antique Rose Forum there're a series of really good pictures of the Hybrid Musk Ballerina with RRD. Buford's excellent series of photos are worth a good long look. Especially notice the canes' diameters in the infected part of the rose. Not only are the leaves on that part 'wrong', but the sum of the thicknesses of the aberrant growth canes greatly exceeds the diameter of the cane that should have been able to support them. (This sort of thing doesn't happen with herbicide damage.) To answer how long to wait, when I've cut back infected canes, by May I will see really ugly growth emerging by early May. Your season is probably a bit behind mine, maybe by two weeks or more. Ann Here is a link that might be useful: RRV on Ballerina

Hi. Jim Amrine and his students are the ones who worked with the mites. Jim thinks that to get the (now we know it's a) virus into the vascular system of the rose, the move is through the cheliceral stylets of the mites. There are also two appendages that sort of look like "hands" in that they have a stalk and a bunch of things that emerge from the bottom of the stalk. Those things can just whir when the mite decides for them to. I don't think anyone knows why. Just translating our thoughts to something that small whose mind is probably a series of if-then statements, and not much more. Can we outwit something that has no wits? Jim is the one who came up with the very logical idea that if the stylets get into undifferentiated meristemic tissue, and put the virus there, then the virus can get into the vascular system. Getting the virus into a pre-existing phloem cell is almost impossible otherwise, because there is no part of the mite that is long enough in microns to reach into the plant into the phloem. In my ebook, take a look at the line drawing of the mite. Now to put that into a size that you know. That mite is the size of a bedroom slipper that would fit on one aphid foot. From what I've read frass transmission of viruses is known for beetles and one of the professors who studied RRD in Arkansas also did the beetle frass work. Check Dr. Rose Gergerich for references. The only cut apart body view of an eriophyid mite that I recall is in a book called Eriophyideae. Just cutting a microtome section through a mite so that it's along the middle of its back AND vertical must have been a challenge. IIRC, the animal has a relatively short digestive tract. It has no respiratory system-that's done through the 'skin'. To opuntiamc's original questions: I know several people who have been devoted insecticide and miticide sprayers. They have continued to have RRD infections. They have made major efforts to remove infected 'wild' roses in the fields around them. Remember we call spider mites and eriophyid mites ....we call them both mites. But there are so many physical differences ...size, predators vs. objects of predation, number and location and articulation of legs, response to us and movement, etc. Even within eriophyids, there are some major differences. The mites that include the RRV vector potential live very differnt lives from the mites that make the galls on oak leaves...even on poison ivy leaves. poison ivy leaf galls What has recently interested me is that the leaves with galls are not widespread on a plant but only on a few and I wonder what we can learn/infer/guess is happening. The one part of the country that hasn't had RRD as much as it 'should' have is the area in the Delta where there was a major spraying program against boll wevils. That eradication program has stopped, so time will tell If it has a positive effect. The -cides have one big negative: their targets develop tolerance and the -cides stop working. Air flow modification does work if you have the room; removing one sick cane earliest...can work some of the time and some of the time beats none of the time, and maybe some of the very small predaceous thrips and mites will continue their hunger for the eriophyids. Ann

The link above worked for me. When I find a link that does not work, I often can find the article by putting the title in quotes and putting it into Google. In this case this results in: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&source=hp&ei=FNPfWq2vI4fusQW-h72QBA&q=%22evaluation-of-rose-germplasm-for-resistance-to-rose-rosette-disease-a%22&oq=%22evaluation-of-rose-germplasm-for-resistance-to-rose-rosette-disease-a%22&gs_l=psy-ab.12...1664.16166.0.18919.4.3.0.0.0.0.127.317.1j2.3.0....0...1.1j2.64.psy-ab..1.1.126.0..35i39k1.0.4DcrZxeltkQ I have a copy of the thesis, but it is copyrighted so I cannot post it. If you have a specific question about it, I can answer the question by putting small sections in quotes. "Table of contents: Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : page 1 - 22 2 SCREENING OF ROSA GERMPLASM FOR RESISTANCE TO ROSE ROSETTE DISEASE UNDER FIELD CONDITIONS : : : page 23 - 45 3 GRAFT AND MECHANICAL TRANSMISSION STUDIES OF ROSE ROSETTE VIRUS : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : page 46 - 54 4 BIOLOGICAL CONTROL OF PHYLLOCOPTES FRUCTIPHILUS (ACARI: ERIOPHYIDAE) USING PREDATORY MITES FROM THE FAMILY PHYTOSEIIDAE (ACARINA: MESOSTIGMATA) : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : pages 55 - 69 Appendix A WEEKS ROSES LETTER TO CUSTOMERS : : : : : : : : : : : : page 70 B ENDPOINT RT-PCR PROTOCOL TO DETECT ROSE ROSETTE EMARAVIRUS : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : page 71 -72 LIST OF TABLES 2.1 Genotypes in this study that have existing resistance data : : : : : page 26 2.2 Results from resistance screening for rose rosette disease, including the number of plants infected and number planted in the field. : : : page 32 -38 2.3 Ordinary run analysis (Madden et al. 1982) : : : : : : : : : : : : : page 41 B.1 Primers used in two-step endpoint RT-PCR protocol : : : : : : : : page 73"