http://www.vintagegardens.com/
love their selection, the roses are on the small side but who cares if you cant find it anywhere else in the world! they grow!

I have hundreds and hundreds of roses from Vintage Gardens. Their retail outlet was once within walking distance of my house, so I used to walk over there and buy as many roses as I could carry home.

I have found that the loss rate is about 5%, but the wonderful selection makes up for that. Some roses just don't want to grow on their own roots and we just have to keep trying unless we can find someone to graft them onto a hardier rootstock for us.

so far nimbus and irish creme are doing all right.. they still look like minis though. can you believe they had brownie again and i missed it.. they emailed me that it was there then a few weeks later it was gone

I think Brownie sells out the first day. It's so hard to find. I got mine from Ashdown years ago, when Ashdown was still sending out nice plants.

I have a great many roses from Vintage...and, no doubt, I will order many more from them.

Have either of you ever popped for having them propagate one for you? Ouch, those ones are through the roof. So far I've been too sane--or is it cheap?

I think it's very expensive and I've never ordered any. Burling Leong at Burlington Nursery will propagate roses for you without charge if she can find the cuttings, or at least she didn't charge extra for it last year. She'll also graft a rose for you if you'd rather not have it in the own-root form. She grew a budded Smoky for me last year and I can't wait to see it bloom this year and start growing like crazy. That's a rose that just refuses to get big on its own roots.

One year I had some credits and they had a rose I really wanted...so that time I went the custom prop. route...but only that once. I can propagate too..If you provide me with with cuttings I can try. But with Burling, it is more of a sure thing. I hear she can propagate a stone!

I am a great fan of Vintage Gardens for their huge, rich variety of roses. And for the care with which they describe them. They are the only catalogue that draws sketches of the form or habit of the rose so you have a sense how it will use space in the garden. I find that incredibly useful. They find fragrance to be important, which means that a lot of roses there are very fragrant. And they have an eye for what makes a rose unique, preserving unique phenotypes among roses. I think I bought roses from them in three separate orders last year. Or maybe four. And if half the roses I buy from them make it for five years in the garden, more of my roses will be from VG than from any other single supplier.

I'm a much worse gardener than zuzu, so I found that about 1 in 10 of their roses are shipped before they are garden-ready and they die on me quickly. In addition, voles and rabbits prefer Vintage Gardens roses to any other rose I've planted, except Heirloom roses. So my loss rate easily exceeds 1 in five, before frost. VG doesn't give very good guidance on how frost-resistant their roses are, so I think I have lost a few more due to that, making my loss rate be about one in three. That's a lot better than it is for a lot of other rose suppliers, but a little worse that in usually is with Antique Rose Emporium.

When VG has clearance sales, though, they tend to sell much better developed roses, roses that get nibbled instead of being swallowed whole by critters. In such cases they can be recommended without reservation.

I lost all my roses from a coop 2-3 ago, all of them, from the place that was going out of business. can't remember who it was. As for Vintage, I have lost roses from them too. I haven't lost roses from anybody else.

i have to confess... sometimes i use their website for the sketches and buy elsewhere .. ive bought from them so im not being a complete user... the site is top notch

Vossner, was it Ashdown you are referring to? I'm not convinced I've lost more than five of those ( I think I bought close to twenty), even though they arrived with the most convincing case of cerclospora fungus I've ever seen. I pulled off the blighted leaves, dipped them all in Green Cure potassium bicarbonate and the blight was gone. Good news for me was that the root systems were wonderfully developed. Edith Bellenden, Baltimore Belle, Cotton Candy, and Blush Noisette kept some green leaves all winter long, and two of the three Jean Bach Sisely are doing well. Francoise Juranville is doing great. Pearl Drift is looking pretty iffy, though I'm not sure what the problem is. Franics E. Lester is being nibbled to death, hardly the fault of Ashdown. One of three La Marne was lost to the same cause and the other two remain on the watch list. All three Nathalie Nypels are gone. Not sure why. I think I'm done with that rose. I've lost it quickly twice. On the whole, I'm glad I bought from them. Will see if that changes by the end of this season.

cerclospora, that was a new word for me (Google 'said' it's actually spelled cercospora, no L )
So glad you are here sharing your knowledge Steve!

So many places went out of business 2-3 years ago that it's hard to guess which one it might have been. I really miss Syl Arena, The Uncommon Rose, Roseland, MerryGro, and Moore's. Then last year we lost Sequoia, and Nor'East, and the selection changed so radically at Amity that we might as well have lost that one too.

Vintage had to keep my latest order for another month or two because the roses were too small to send out. I'm really glad about this because the occasional but almost inevitable early deaths will be on them instead of on me. I hope Calico and Apache Tears don't succumb to an early death because I really, really, really want them.

I don't remember Ashdown being involved with a co-op...was it Great Lakes?

Melva, you and I organized a pseudo-co-op with Countryside Roses three years ago. Maybe that's the one Nery's talking about.

Sue, thanks for the welcome and the spelling lesson. So someone much closer to vossner's neck of the woods took their roses to a local extension service to ID the disease. It was the first time I'd heard of it, too.

It's sad to lose so many good suppliers. I guess it reinforces the idea of supporting the ones we have who offer a lot of choices in roses.

Yes, but she didn't go out of business...or did she?

Oh, dear. Well, you caught me being scatterbrained, Melva. Of course she didn't, so Nery must be talking about Great Lakes.

Scared me! She is still in business...whew!
http://www.countrysideroses.co...