Okay.... so it looks like I'll have to evaluate AF this season and see how she does. I originally said that I give my roses no special care... no spraying because we live along a tidal river with lots of birds and animal life... no dusting, no fertilizing.... just renewed compost each spring and watering occasionally. We have a wide variety of roses, love them and try to be as organic/non-chemical as possible. But I can still recall the color ... the ruffled petals and fragrance of the Angel Face I grew about 30 years ago in my first home. Loved that rose!

Jax, That fortuniana survived for a decade without catching a mite was the hope, that and its distance from R. multiflora on the part of both of its parents. I wasn't going for a genetic salvation, but I hoped that there might be a cultural barrier tied to the preferred growth times of banksia and laevigata. I had hoped that the 'off' growth cycle of fortuniana might be a saving grace, that it grows through winter when the mites aren't out. Mine was relatively dormant through summer, and post bloom spring pruning sufficed. An example is R. setigera which doesn't get RRD often, even though R. multifloras in the same fencerows (unsprayed with herbicides) get RRD rather easily. R. setigera just doesn't get 'that' large nor is it actively growing through summers here. Not exactly a cultural barrier , but a reduced propensity to contract the disease. There are so many instances where one rose appears to have avoided infection, and the more we know, we find that others of the same cultivar are infected. Wind tunnels with a speeded up wind speed are not practical at all (although they work). I have always expected RRD to infect all roses, but I had hoped that some barriers might exist in nature, a lesser propensity to infection for the ones that go to near dormancy in summer, ones who have a limited window of opportunity for the mites to feed on undifferentiated meristem tissue in axillary buds or at the ends of broken stems (the latter seems to be the problem here). Or maybe have really tight buds that the mite's feeder tube can't get through. As to a pest that will take out the eriophyid mite: it's out there and was described early on in the Allington, Staplin and Viehmeyer paper. The predators are conventional spider mites; in the isolation labs at the University of Nebraska they were trying to study the eriophyids, but spidermites kept getting in and destroying the eriophyid populations. Amrine and his students have also found some unnamed species of predaceous thrips will feed on erophyids AND thrips. I don't use insecticides or acaricids on my roses. I haven't in a long time.

Sounds like fun....but afraid it might be a very long commute for me. Linda C

Henry, do you live around Tulsa? I thought you lived in Indiana. I also live in Tulsa. Sammy