I discovered roses when I lived in Austin, Texas as a young adult. As I wandered the meandering paths of a local nursery I would see the two gallon potted roses from Antique Rose Emporium. The roses weren't in bloom when I bought them, so I would depend on the rather fanciful descriptions of the blossoms. 'Faded Gold kissed lightly with pink' might have been a description of the color of Fortune's Yellow which also had a fanciful alternative name, "Gold of Ophir." Who cannot be bewitched by such things? OK, I understand, most sane people. But it worked for me. I bought a "Gold of Ophir" and trained it on a nearby wooden fence. I think it died for lack of water by week six, but it was not long before I had an established Old Parson's Pink climber trained on one of those cheap wooden arbors one gets for vining plants at Home Depot. It was the first flowering plant of my gardening life and I was very proud of it.
This was in the early 1990s and I was aware of two suppliers. Antique Rose Emporium sold roses in two gallon pots. The roses were well developed having root systems that were usually sufficient to hold together the full two gallons of potting soil they were in. These roses, too, would generally grow pretty quickly to final height. The other sold bare root roses by mail order: two year old roses grafted onto Dr Huey rootstock and graded #1, a specification which, in my recollection translated into a rose with big, heavy canes and thick, long roots. It was a rose that would grow quickly to bloom size in the garden. In both cases one could lose a rose before maturity from some kind of abnormal circumstance: complete failure to give supplemental water in the first year, an attack of blackspot, overspray from nearby use of Roundup, or vicious daily attacks from rabbits and/or deer on the new leaves and shoots. But absent these kinds of failures, success was a high probability event.
A few years after my first successful roses with ARE I started receiving catalogues from Jackson and Perkins. Sun Flare was in my first order from them and it did very well in the warm Texas sun and heavy clay. Roses, in those days seemed easy. I bought a Ballerina rose and in its early days it got a touch of blackspot. But by the middle of year two it had stopped growing so vigorously, hardened off, and seemed immune. A New Dawn rose that I had bought in a gallon pot and planted at a downspout had, in a year grown to over 15 feet in height. Some of the roses I planted were not quite so successful; but I was pleased with most of them.
In the mid nineties I moved from TX to NJ. I planted a lot of roses from Jackson and Perkins. In the first years they all died of blackspot. Maybe there was a touch of neglect involved. Betty Boop really should not have been planted directly under that particular shrub, there was too much shade. Sometimes I did not deliver enough water, and so on. But blackspot played a key role in the demise of nearly all of the failures from ARE, J&P, Pickering, Sam Kedem, and a few other mail order suppliers. I ordered many roses from Antique Rose Emporium. Fantin Latour did well, though it grew very slowly. Early on there was a centifolia with very soft canes that infected the whole garden with blackspot; and removing it made things go a lot better. Sombreuil, Dortmund, and Phyllis Bide did well for while. Errant Roundup killed Sombreuil and Dortmund. Phyllis Bide grew quickly, but collapsed in dry weather. Harrison's Yellow got shovel pruned because I did not understand that it needed five years or so to really fill out. Over the years I planted Playboy, Sally Holmes, New Dawn, City of York, Sea Foam, Olympiad, Knockout, Alba Maxima, Felicity, The Alexandra Rose, Tess of the d’Ubervilles, Mary Rose, Sophy's Rose, Champlain, Don Juan, Mrs John Laing, Queen of Denmark and a few more. With all but a few hybrid tea roses I failed, and black spot was generally in the equation. Ditto floribundas. With essentially every other rose I succeeded and I was very pleased with the garden.
By the time I had lived in NJ for 13 years I had the confidence that I could plant a rose and it would grow -- provided it was not a rose that suffered from blackspot.
Somewhere in that period I tried ordering roses from one company that delivered smaller plants. That’s when I learned that roses can fail not from the neglect of the gardener but from the neglect of the nursery. Every single rose that I ordered from (Unnamed Company) died. And it did it with admirable efficiency. I do not believe one survived three weeks. It did not matter how big a hole I put in the ground. It did not matter what I filled it with. It did not matter what attention I lavished on it. In three weeks the rose was dead. So I removed the supplier from my 'approved vendor' list and did not order from them for more than a decade.
What was different? That vendor sold roses in smallish pots. They might have been bands, although I think the containers were not so tall as bands. The roots of the roses they sold in those little containers, in no case in my memory, touched the plastic walls. The plants were rooted cuttings. Only just. I remember planting a rose called The Fairy - a rose that is reknown in the industry (or should be) as being impossible to kill - that was not yet two inches high. I think it was gone in a week. I lost several dozen such roses in a row, as I recall. And very quickly.
The story, I would find out decades later from people in the know, is that 'you just need to pot them up and grow them on in your greenhouse until they have reached the same two gallon size as those from ARE.' Wait, Wait! What greenhouse are we talking about? Rooted cuttings, indeed, are suitable to be grown to band size when they are grown a greenhouse that is provided with an automated watering system. As they grow in their regularly watered, temperature controlled environments safely out of reach of nibbling animals, they can be progressively repotted until they have grown root systems large enough to bind all the potting soil in a two gallon container. At such a point they should be roughly as viable as the two gallon roses I got from Antique Rose Emporium. At least if they happened to be the same culivars and if they happened to be hardened off correctly, packaged and shipped expeditiously. This is the idea that began to form in my head. Or should have.
Some years after swearing off rooted cuttings from (Unnamed Company whose management has changed twice and whose cultivation techniques have improved more times than that in the intervening decades) I moved to Prescott, AZ. I imagined that this area would have several advantages in terms of rose growing:
1) it is USDA zone 7b whereas my location in NJ was USDA zone 6b,
2) for most of the rose growing season the humidity here hovers around 20 to 30 percent, too low for most fungal infections.
The first two years I gardened here I learned a number of things:
1) roses need more supplemental water than I had imagined
2) roses that were cold hardy in NJ died here of frost damage
3) when it rains in July and August (monsoon season) roses can get fungal diseases
4) gophers, rabbits, and deer covet rose leaves as food and they will go to great lengths to eat these plants, especially when the plants are young.
5) suitable cultivars, of adequate size on arrival, planted at the right time of the year, and given adequate water tended to do very well, indeed.
Living in Arizona meant I was geographically a lot closer to places like Vintage Gardens who had a huge catalogue and I began ordering roses from there. The plants I received looked good much of the time. Or at least they did after I took the pains of explaining to the proprietor that roses less than six inches high were always nibbled to death by rabbits, gophers, ground squirrels and whatnot, but knee-high plants survived these particular garden insults - through the first growing season anyway. In comparison to those plants I received long before in containers that were as small as two inches tall, the VG bands were impressive. In comparison to the two gallon roses from ARE, however, the canes were generally not half as big in diameter. Roses sold as bands had a tiny fraction as much plant material as in a rose properly sold as a two gallon rose. And this made it more prone to damage from all sorts of ordinary, regular, known garden insults.
Over the course of three or four years between 2009 and 2013, VG was in the process of winding down their mail order business and they conducted a number of promotional sales. I was in the process of populating a brand new garden and I bought a lot of roses. There were a few orders early on when I might have ordered six or eight bands at a time. But as the end drew near, I was struck by a kind of panic at the prospect of the full VG catalogue becomming unavailable, and it was common for me to buy two dozen plants in a sale. I think it would be a reasonable estimate to say that I purchased about 150 roses from them in growing seasons 2009 through 2013. My documentation supports the idea that in the last two years alone I ordered 100.
These are the roses that survive today:
1) Nouveau Monde - a marvelous presence in the garden with pink rosette roses much like Pink Pet, but with a habit that is more graceful than any other plant in my garden.
2) Crepe Rose - In the same vein as NM, except with darker flowers produced later in the season. Collapsed last summer presumably due to gopher damage to the roots, seems to be coming back.
3) Looping - In five years it has reached head height and bloomed twice for a total of three blossoms. Lovely, but nothing like a climber.
4) America - In five years it has reached chest height and bloomed three times for a total of three blossoms, each to-die-for beautiful. Lovely, gorgeous, awesome, but nothing like a climber.
5) Centennaire des Lourdes - An open, gangly plant whose flowers are a bit informal. They are a very lovely mix of white and pink. Every year it is on the shovel-prune long list.
6) One unidentified pink floribunda, which is not ankle heigh after five years in the garden. Lovely blossom colors, both blossoms.
7) Agatha Christie - a hybrid tea climber has reached knee-high and has produced its second blossom in its fifth year. Big, long lasting flowers, not especially lovely. Nothing like a climber.
8) Psyche - a very vigorous grower with blossoms that are (putatively) white. Waiting for first blossom.
9) Chatillon Rose - (one of two) No rose is more profoundly proliferous in its spring flush; none in my garden so prone to downy mildew.
10) Heinrich Conrad Soth - it has grown into a bigger plant than we had hoped. Pretty flowers but, overall, unrefined.
11) Dreaming Sires - approaching 24 inches in height, still a little short to qualify as a good climber. Produced a blossom once. It was beautiful, and we hope for more. In its defense, it occupies a tough spot in the garden.
12) Dearest - nears ankle height, currently promising its second blossom ever.
I began planting roses in earnest in 2010 and 2011 and VG was among my suppliers. I started keeping records in the middle of 2012, so I have orders from 2012 and 2013 at which point VG closed to mail-order business. The list of roses I bought from VG which perished in my garden is shown at the end of this article. The list of lost roses extends to 88. So of the 100 for which I have records 12 survived, a survival rate of 12%.
But if we look at which survivors fill the niches for which they were slated, only Chatillon Rose, Nouveau Monde, and Heinrich Conrad Soth actually succeed. That's a success rate of 3%. The other nine roses, though still alive, cannot yet be characterized as successful. Of the three that fill their intended niches, only Nouveau Monde is her to stay. The others are at risk of shovel pruning. So... I bought something like 150 roses from VG of which one is actually something I might do again if I had all the information I have now.
Would I buy Nouveau Monde again? The grassy green foliage of Nouveau Monde strikes me as being the wrong color, but there is not a rose in the garden with a more graceful habit, and few are more generous with its blooms. It blooms early enough in the season for its roses to complement the blue iris that grow at its feet. And it needs less water than just about any other rose in the garden. Probably, the answer is yes, I would buy it again. Would I pay $600 (buy thirty roses to get one success x $20 each) for it? I seriously doubt it. Would I pay $3000 (the only rose out of 150 that's a keeper) for it? If I did, it would certainly not be to have it as a garden plant; I'd have rose breeding in mind.
There are lots of things that affect one’s success with roses, so how do we know this is a problem only of plant size? How do we know that there is not some independent issue associated with cultivation practices?
Lets look at data from two rose suppliers that sell roses both as gallons and as bands for the planting seasons of 2012 and 2013. For Rogue Valley Roses our success with bands was 5 for 16. For Heirloom Roses the success rate was 6 for 26. Again, the data is included at the end of the article. The success rate for bands, then, was 11 for 52, or 21%. This is materially better than the success rate with Vintage Gardens roses; but it’s hard to characterize it as being very good. By comparison, the success rate for gallons from the same suppliers was 4 for 8 or 50%, more than twice as high. For two gallon container roses from ARE the success rate was 19 for 26, or 73%. When planting container roses in the garden size matters.
Before we go much farther we need to mention that the subject of a subsequent work will be the issue of which roses grow well on their own roots and which ones do not. We will be making the argument that most hybrid tea roses and some meaningful portion of floribunda roses simply do not have roots vigorous enough to support the growth and flower production we expect in hybrid tea roses. We will also argue that hybrid tea roses have certain other weaknesses that predispose them to failure in this mountain environment. Roughly one third of the roses in the Vintage Garden order list are hybrid teas. If we were to eliminate them from our considerations, saying that they fail for reasons other than initial plant size, then the success rate with bands for VG goes from 12% to 18% which is not out of line with experience from other vendors.
Long story short: plant a band in your garden; water it three times a week, grow it where it will not get black spot, avoid hybrid tea roses in your orders, and you can expect to lose 80% of your roses, most in the first year. Or I can, at any rate. Change any of these stipulations and your banded roses will disappear faster.
Spend half again as much and buy a gallon rose and your odds go up to about 50%. Nice in theory, but most suppliers who sell bands have gallons in very short supply. Fifty percent a number I can live with; but it's not very good. I have tried, btw, growing roses in containers to a larger size. This did increase my success rate by nearly a factor of two; but I still lost more roses than if I had bought gallons. I still do not have a greenhouse.
So, how does all this compare to roses grown on budded rootstock? In 2013 I lost every single rose from Regan and from Garden Valley Roses. Thirty roses or so. I think it was because they arrived in mid February and early March and they must have suffered from freeze-thaw cycling dozens of times by late April. Most would be stone-cold-dead by mid-April when there were still two or three good frosts left in the season. Mid April is when the David Austin roses arrive. I'm always in a panic because some of my roses have been leafed out for a full month. Sometimes, though, that's the problem. And, of cours, most of the roses from Regan and GVR were hybrid tea roses and floribundas. So they would be especially vulnerable to freeze-thaw cycling.
My 2013 Palatine order arrived after the Regan and GVR orders, and it went into the ground on March 20th, three weeks before the DA roses would arrive. Of twenty-two roses planted that day seven survive to today. Larissa, Caramella Fairy Tale, and Julia Child (5) have been stars of the garden. Roberta Bondar collapsed and is presumed to have lost roots to gophers. The survival rate for the 2013 Palatine order is about 33%. All of the hybrid tea roses are dead. The survival rate absent them was 7/15, or nearly 50%. The previous year, I think, had a much better batting average; I know of ten roses that survive. Two hybrid tea roses from that order Janet Carnochan and Charles de Gaulle are gone, victims of freeze-thaw cycling. Again, neglecting the losses of HT roses the survival rate edges up near 80%. This is a satisfactory number, IMO. It is in line with the success rate for roses from Antique Rose Emporium, around 75%.
So does anything work really well? The average survival rate for David Austin Roses is darn close to 90%. Part of this is because I've ordered no hybrid tea roses from DA roses. Another part is that they ship late in the season - around mid April. I count more than three dozen DA roses established in my garden. I lost three due to gophers nibbling off roots and one from wet roots. The rest survive and thrive. Given these numbers the success here is 89%. And that’s about what I think I should be getting if I am planting roses that are both well cultivated in the nursery and well suited to my garden.
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VG PLANTS Lost - A partial list...
Kimono, Hobby, City of Leeds, Casino, Summer Wine, Pinocchio, The Garland, Paul's Lemon Pillar, Easlea's Golden Rambler, Titian, Coral Crown, Lili Marlene, Apricot Nectar, Campanile, Alain, Rosemary Rose, Pariser Charme, Madame duBost, Utro Moskvy, Capistrano, Hawkeye Belle, Highfield, Santana, Rose du Roi, Gold Fassade, Gold Star, Zeus, The Prince's Trust, Eugene Degaches, Gourdalt, First Edition, Akebono, Chrysler Imperial, Comtesse Vandal, Lady Elgin, Tampico, Burnaby, Oklahoma, Shi-Un, Senegal, Zeus, Exploit, Mary Webb, A Shropshire Lass, Lemon Spice, Bronze Masterpiece, Old Timer, Sweet Afton, Papa Meilland, Faberge, Radox Bouquet, Lilac Dawn, Charles Lawson, Red Gold, Sunbonnet, Chaplin's Pink Climber, Apricot Glow, Fraulein Octavia Hesse, Floradora, Camieux, Laure Davoust, Radway Sunrise, Long John Silver, Claire Matin, Atomic White, Century Two, Phare, Brightstide Cream, Reine des Violettes, Ulrich Brunner Fils, Norbert Levavasseur, Schoene Dortmunderin, Lady Ann Kidwell, Miss Canada, Rembrandt, Dairy Maid, Minuette, Remember Me, Tropicana, Parfait, Lilac Dawn, Playboy, Christine Wright, Spiced Coffee, Britannia, Bewitched, Golden Masterpiece, Royal Dane, Grandpa Dickson, Copper Pernetiana, Chatillon Rose(one of two) Ivory Fashion, Parfait.
ARE Spring 2012:
Mme Alfred Carriere 4/4, Alfred Colombe 0/1, Duke of Edinburgh 1/1, Winter Sunset 1/1, Great Western 1/1, Mme Ernst Calvat 1/1, Francis Dubrueil 0/1, Souvenir de la Malmaison (0/2), Caldwell Pink (2/2), Madame Plantier (2/2)
Gallons: 12 for 16, 75% success.
RVR 2012 Bands
Butterscotch (0/1)
Happpy (0/1)
Emily Gray (0/1)
Red Parfum (0/1)
Borderer (0/1)
Linneas Rose (1/1)
James Mason (1/1)
Marchioness of Londonderry (1/1)
Nuits de Young (1/1)
James Mason (1/1)
Merveille de Lyon (1/1)
Bubble Bath (0/1)
Dixieland Linda (0/1)
Soleil d'Or (0/1)
Darlow's Enigma (1/1)
Isobel d'Ortiz (0/1)
Bands: 5 for 16 or
Heirloom 2012 Gallons
Prairie Star Gallon 1/1
Portlandia Gallon 1/1
Quietness Gallon 1/1
Charlotte Gallon 1/1
Noble Anthony Gallon 0/1
Mary Rose Gallon 0/1
Molineux Gallon 0/1
Gallons: 4 for 8, about 50%
Heirloom 2012 Bands
Dixieland Linda 0/1
Oshun 0/1
Paul Shirville 0/1
Sheila's Perfume 1/1
Cheshire 0/1
Clotilde Soupbert 0/1
Bubble Bath 0/1
Comice de Tarn et Garonne 1/1
Little Darling 1/1
Autumn Sunset 0/1
Hawkeye Belle 0/1
Golden Unicorn 0/1
Country Dancer 0/1
Wedding Bells 0/1
Good Ol Summertime 2/2
Ballerina 0/1
Great Century 0/1
Fragrant Cloud 0/1
Beverly 0/2
Velvet Fragrance 1/1
A Shropshire Lad 0/1
Clair Austin 0/1
Litchfield Angel 0/1
Lady Emma Hamilton 0/1
Bands 6 for 26, about 23%
Palatine Order 2013
Buxom Beauty 0/2
Grandessa 0/3
Julia Child 5/5
Fairhope 0/3
Paula Smart 0/3
Kordes Brilliant 1/1
Larissa 1/1
Roberta Bondar 0/1
Lorice W.kowski. 0/1
Signature 0/1
Caramella FT 1/1
Bare root; 7/22, about 33%
ARE Order Spring 2013 - Excluding Driveway Bed outside Fence
Gene Boerner 1/1
Lady Pamela Carol 1/1
Mme C Testout 1/1
Prosperity 4/4
Maggie 0/3
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Exclude roses planted in driveway bed.
Gallons: 7 for 10.
NOTES to SELF
1) I have excluded from consideration all roses planted outside the fenced area. Until recently the loss rate here was 100% with nibbling animals, dry conditions, and poor soil, playing a significant roles. Including these would have biased the results because none of the failures were due to any significant degree on initial rose size - the subject of this work.
2) The E. Rose order of 2017 :
Ingrid Bergman, Kardinal (2) desiccated, Olympiad desiccated, Folklore, Elina (2) one desiccated, Good as Gold (2), Midas Touch, Secret (2) both in good condition, A. Horstman, Sedona smallish and dead, New Zealand (2) smallish and growing vigorously, Fragrant Plum (2) one smallish and desiccated, now dead and one fat, large healthy, Love (2), Dick Clark (1) growing vigorously, Big Purple (2) fat and healthy growing vigorously, Papa Meilland (2) desiccated big plants might survive, Arizona, Autumn Sunset, Vavoom, Polynesian Punch growing vigorously, Sexy Rexy no sign of life, Angel Face, Neil Diamond, America, White Licorice growing vigorously. Roxy (4) on own roots growing.
As a note to self for future work I comment that I received the above 36 bare root roses,on Dr Huey rootstock (except for Roxy) during the last week in March and they were planted within 48 hours of arrival. Six, I would say, were severely desiccated because they were light for their generous size. A lot could change: specifically, I could lose many to yo-yo weather next spring; but right now I can only count out three of these.
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