Roses: Looking for a True Red, 1 by DonnaMack

DonnaMack wrote:
OK, be patient for my DA rant!

In his catalog, he has a listing of own root roses. It\'s relatively small, and he has only been offering them to the public for a couple of years. Where has he been? He saves his bigger own root roses for garden centers, where they try to get $30. When no one bites, it goes down to $20. He tries to get very high prices for own root old garden roses that have been in commerce forever.

I just hauled a Jude the Obscure out of the ground that has been there for at least five years. I was sent it by mistake. GORGEOUS flowers, but in five years I have gotten perhaps a total of 15. And then it started dwindling down, so I pulled it out and threw it into a pot. OK, it\'s leafing out again, but it\'s less than a foot tall. Does it deserve a spot in my garden? Jury is out.

I find you shouldn\'t pay any attention to what DA says about his roses. He\'s a salesman. I instead go to the Chicago Botanic Garden, where the soil is really awful and where they don\'t take care of their roses, and see what grows well. Or I go to a garden center in August, when they are sick of taking care of the roses, and don\'t choose ones with disease.

I love it when he is introducing a new rose and disses the old ones. No royalty on the old ones, you see. Years ago he promoted Glamis Castle. I found one in a garden center in Racine Wisconsin in August. It was perfect! They get tired of taking care of them by then. No blackspot! No mildew! And it had been marked down from $27.99 to $9.99. OK! Then he disavowed it. I was selling my house a few years back and was only coming once a week to take care of the garden, which means I wasn\'t doing much other than watering. I got out of my car - the thermometer read 101, to find what you see below. In a corner of hardscaping (no air circulation), no water. The pic doesn\'t reflect it, but it had more than 20 flowers on it. So when I moved here I bought two. I think it\'s one of his best.

He screamed about what a great rose William Shakespeare was. Then he discovered it was really terrible - a diseased mess. And introduced William Shakespeare 2000. So what do you do if you have the original?

Several of his roses I have been stuck with don\'t rebloom until fall or produce no more than three or four roses at a a time or are not the color he says. Here is \'The Dark Lady\' upon arrival. Here is the description from his web site:

\"Dark, dusky crimson, loosely formed blooms, reminiscent of tree peonies.\"

Uh huh.

So I only own his classics, like Constance Spry. Heritage is nice, but the flowers shatter almost immediately. I like \'Tess\', but he describes it as growing 3-4 feet, or 6-8 as a climber. It does both - which is OK if you know it. But it sprawls all over the place, so it is best against a trellis with some room in front of it so it can do what it wants, and baby, it will.

He claims that he took old garden roses and made them better. Except he didn\'t. I have a beloved client who has a bunch of his roses (oh, yes, several hueys - I was able to identify them for her). You have to feed the heck out of his roses to get them to produce, and it doesn\'t always work. Look out for phrases he uses like \"better grown in threes\" - it means they are skimpy, or \"benefits from summer pruning\" which means it grows really awkwardly and randomly sends up tall stems that make the plant unbalanced, or \"benefits from rich feeding\" which means that you have to give it lots and lots of food and compost to get a half way decent performance.

I\'ll take Morden Blush or Gruss an Aachen or Marie Pavie any day. They bloom and bloom and bloom with no care. I don\'t grow floribundas (they die in my yard) but I got \'Julia Child\' and I don\'t grow hybrid teas but got \'Just Joey\' for a client last year and they are wonderful. If you like yellow, Julia is a wonderful rose. Lovely, shiny leaves (it\'s hard for fungus to stick to shiny leaves) a very balanced shape and consistent bloom. \'Just Joey\' is apricot, with eager bloom. I just put Joey\'s graft union half way to China.