Kuzariprincess - I just LOVE L.D. Braithwaite. What sumptuous roses!! Divine!! My 4 year old plant is about 2 feet X 2 feet and will grow taller. There are lots of buds on it! Souvenir de la Malmaison overwintered in your garden? Great!! I bought it this year. Really weird that it survived and your Morden didn't! Shazam - 50 buds!!! Wow!! I bought Bonica my first year growing roses and it died overwinter. I'm reluctant to try it again. Although it SHOULD survive winter here. Maybe I just didn't know what I was doing that first year. Janet - I wish we were at the "just enjoy it stage." We still have SOOOO much work to do. Oh well, it's fun! Well - BLANC DOUBLE de COUBERT won my first rose race!!!! Followed the next day by J.P. Connell!!! They both have around 50 buds each. Roses rule!! Carol

In my experience weather can affect the blooms to the point of them dying before having a chance to mature.. A very dry wind should be able to dry them out before opening. My MIP suffers from such events a lot. It might be a reaction from the rose itself conserving humidity or energy under adverse conditions. Less established / mature roses tend to suffer more. But it would better if somebody more accustomed to your kind of weather chimes in.

I'm glad I started this thread. I'm not sure that we got down to 40 degrees F here, but it definitely has been unusually cool and rainy for this time of year. Still, I'm researching this boron thing. In my original post I complained about RdV's issues. RdV has always had blooming issues,even with "normal" weather in my garden,except for that one great flush I got after giving it the cracked corn last year. Though I'm reluctant to do it again now because of the badger issue, that DOES give me hope,and also suggests that there is a nutritional issue. Another rose that has been bothering me a lot is Charles XII. The fact is that I've never yet managed to get a satisfying bloom flush from this rose,even though it is now in it's 4th or 5th season in my garden. Now, earlier , I was threatening Chas. with The Shovel,but now I think it'd be unfair to judge him on the basis of this year's spring, just because it really IS chilly (and Chas was bred in a warm climate, to boot). However I think it quite possible that there's some kind of nutritional issue with this rose, too. I know that it is planted in very, very poor soil. This area of my garden's "soil" was pure clay, very, very inert. Nothing was growing there when I started out. Chopping with my pick,I could see that this area consisted of the typical very "soft" rock that makes up a lot of my soil. Don't know what it's called, but I'm pretty sure that, once exposed to air and water, in time this stuff breaks down into clay. Good for water retention, but totally unfertile. It's quite possible that I just didn't amend it enough, or with the right stuff. The Climbing Old Blush that I have growing in similar soil has much more marked disease issues than other plants of the same rose growing elsewhere in my garden,and the tips of the shoots all suffer die-back . I've only just begun my on-line reading, but have already read that boron deficiency, for example, is thought to play a part in causing bull-heads and proliferation in roses. Chas. also has vegetative centers; not sure if this is the same as proliferation. Another oddity: the ends of the side shoots on the older canes show a sort of die-back. These canes all seem to be blind shoots, whilst younger ones produce buds...must study this more! I did try to go easy on the nitrogen this year with Charles,so I wouldn't THINK that excess nitrogen was the problem, but you never know...

Too wet, too dry or some other environmental adversity. Including perhaps the onset of autumnal temperatures. This likes rich soil, many of them here - where there is a lot of them to observe, both at outlets and in plantings - have quite poor leaf color most of the time. And hibiscus in general aren't wild about acidic soil either, which is dominant in my area.