I didn't get a mail from them last night.. damn! Oh well...

Maybe that means they were able to reserve all of your choices for you, Toni. They may have contacted me mainly to tell me that two of my choices were gone. They asked whether I wanted to choose any others instead.

lollll - that would be nice but I'm not holding my breath. If I get 'em, wonderful. If not, oh well.
EDIT: Got the email this morning, no, English Perfume & Twilight Tryst were not available. I can get the others locally, so I told Pat I'd have to wait til next year I guess & cancelled my order. Oh well.

I finally called in my order. I was out if town and wanted to order from my computer instead of using internet on the phone, then when i got home, the dog pulled the laptop off the table and broke it! So, back to Android. RU was sold out of 4/5 of the ones i most wanted. I went with 3 second choices. Then she says to mail them a check! I would have ordered the first day if i had known that i wasnt going to be paying over the internet. Oh well. Now i know. Shipping was almost same amt as the roses yikes! Funny how chamblee shipped me 17 potted roses for $12 less than RU charges for 4 roses. Both use UPS, too. I'm glad to be getting more Austins. The price is less than it would be from Austin.

Cindi - Yea, that's my biggest complaint about RU - can't order on their website, takes forever to get in touch with them via phone or email, and have to mail them payment (I *hate* shipping money that way). Their shipping costs *are* ridiculous, but their roses cannot be beat, seriously. Since this is your first time w/them, you're gonna be SO surprised when you see the difference between Chamblee's little bitties & RU's gorgeousness.

Wellllll........... my order from Roses Unlimited arrived today. I'm going to have to hunt for the SD card that has the pics I took of my Chamblee order, but seriously, I think the Chamblee roses are bigger than the ones from RU. Not that either were small for a 1 gallon rose, not complaining, you understand. Well I guess I am complaining about the shipping cost from RU. The roses do look healthy, and Glamis Castle has a bloom on it. They are definitely 2 yr, own-root roses. None of the Austin roses have any canes as large as a pencil, but Guy de Maupassant is a bit bigger.
This year, the clear winner in my orders was Palatine, hands-down.

I took another look at my early spring order from Austin Roses, and it looks like, for me, it's less expensive to order Austins directly from Austin Roses. The bare root roses that Austin shipped me were substantially larger than the RU roses, and probably a year older. All but one of the roses from Austin were own-root, just like RU. Austin was running a special where you get 1 free if you order 4, so that's how the price was less. Shipping from Texas is much much cheaper, also.
Our Rose Society is taking a bus trip to Tyler and Shreveport this October for the rose festival. We are stopping at several rose nurseries. I can't wait to see fields of roses! I won't be the only one bringing back new lovelies, either.

Cindi - Yea, they do have very thin canes, but they have a selection that can't be beat. But their shipping costs *do* suck...lolll.

I'm afraid I jumped too late. Next year I'm going to have to buy before the sale, just so I don't miss ordering for another year. Somehow I'm just doing something else when RU sales start. And yeah, paying $8 per plant for delivery seems outrageous. I know it's apples-to-oranges because one is bare root and one is potted, but I paid $2 per plant for 3-day FedEX from Palatine this year.

I've believed that Caribbean must be in my garden for some time. And now that I live in Prescott, I think Arizona should be too. What other roses should I get from RU next year? - I'm especially interested in ones that I cannot get somewhere else, or should not.

Steve - Oh my, the list is endless with what RU has... I just wish they had a better than 30% survival rate for me.

Steve, I compared apples to apples---Chamblee ships 1 gallon potted plants, just like RU. I received 17 potted roses from Chamblee and the shipping fee was $24.
Shipping for 4 roses from RU was $36.
Both came UPS. Chamblee plants were larger, too. They were packaged in a similar way. They are all growing just fine now. I do realize RU has some roses that nobody else has, so that's why I paid an amount I thought was outrageous.
Best plants this year came from Palatine, but one from that order never broke dormancy, but I have not yet asked what they will do about that. 1 out of 9, that's not terrible. On the Edmunds order, 1/5 didn't break dormancy. From last fall's Brushwood order, 3/8 did not make it. They were just too little. Everything else looks pretty good.
Hopefully Zuzu will give us a heads-up again this year when Palatine starts taking fall orders. I was so happy to "score" a Red Intuition by buying on the first day last year. It is blooming now, and it does not disappoint!

Cindi - Call up Rachel & tell her that the one didn't break dormancy. She'll probably set aside another one for you. She stated that they're probably not going to be doing English roses again because they just wouldn't graft right. They're so awesome. My Red Intuition is *trying* to blossom, but I am not going to let it bloom until it gets a little more robust.

I don't know if I'm going to order from RU again. I had almost a 100% loss from them last year... only like 2-3 survived out of the 20 I ordered last year. I know I will NOT be ordering from Edmunds.. I had a 100% death rate from them this year (I only received 1 out of 3 roses I ordered, Music Box, and it was soooooo pathetic, didn't survive at all). Didn't order from GVR, everything I wanted they had on their website, but when I called, they weren't available (so why have them on the website?).

Maybe that's what I should do--cut off the blossoms on my Red Intuitions. We're expecting highs from 99-102 for the next week. The blooms are fairly small, same as my new prize Ketchup and Mustard. The first bloom on it was very nice, but the rest have been more like minis. Maybe it's a heavy feeder?
At least the foliage is clean. Can't say that for all my new roses.

Cindi - I agree.. the rest of the blooms on my K&M have been microscopic little things that are very flat & not attractive at all. If I'd seen these blooms on the rose there at the nursery, I would not have bought the plant at all. I cut off the blooms so that the rose spends it's energy in growing & not blooming. Right now, at 826am, it's already 72degs w/a projected high of 102 today & 104 tomorrow, which is ridiculous. Our norms are in the upper 70s.

With that kind of heat, you may lose some spruce trees. We found out last year that they can't handle high temps with dry wind. In July, the temps here were 110, but with your altitude, 100 may do damage.
Roses seemed to handle it just fine.

I don't have any spruces.. the only spruce on my block is a 30 year old tree.

I'm not looking forward to these temps. I'm gonna be a giant pile of melted tallow by the time next week rolls around.

Do you have air conditioning?
my whole career, I only had air conditioning 4 years. What kind of business doesn't have air conditioning, you ask? Welllll.....public schools.
The schools built here in the last 8 years or so do have AC.
I work outside most of the day now, but I wear long sleeves and a hat.
Just about got everything mulched heavy, getting ready for the long hot dog days.

Cindi, Congrats on getting things mulched before the hot days of summer! I finally broke down and hired someone. If it works out well this year, the mulch will go down a little earlier next year. And maybe the water bills will be smaller. Thanks for the comparison of shipping prices.

I, too, will focus my rose-buying next year on Palatine. I'll probably buy a few roses from DA. I'll definitely try Chamblees for one or two. RVR will probably figure in there a little; at least as long as Chic is alive in my garden. For the several cultivars that can be found nowhere else, it will be RU. I'm definitely hoping, though, that the number of roses I buy next year and thereafter will be small compared to what I've been buying over the last two years.

They predicted highs here this week of 100F, but it hasn't gotten over 95F. And it's supposed to cool down to the low 90s soon.

Toni, Thirty percent survival rate is a lot higher than I have averaged here with bands - at least over the first three seasons. I've certainly done better with gallon roses. A bit. This year my batting average appears to be really a lot higher, having lost only two roses from being planted on a slope without a 'funnel,' and in a place that grew over with catmint so I forgot to water, and a DA rose from Palatine that never did anything. Given the number I planted this year, my success rate so far this year mighty be close to 95%. I am amazed at how incredibly important it is that potted roses arrive in my garden growing vigorously at precisely the moment when the weather conditions are correspondingly favorable. I think maybe conditions are favorable for a day in May, perhaps May 08th. Before that, the risk of frost is too great and cool nights can set them back too easily. After that, summer is too short for a decent growing season. Or daytime highs are too high. Or the ground is too dry. With this kind of schedule, however, daily watering seems imperative at least through the first year. Similarly, if the roses are not growing vigorously, conditions here will too frequently not be good enough to favor such growth, and the plants wither away to nothing.

I admire the persistence shown by those of you who grow roses despite significant climate challenges! I'm afraid I would have been discouraged ages ago. If I plant a rose I can expect it to live - at least for a couple of years and much longer if I just avoid the Hybrid teas and their close relatives.

Cindi - yes, I have central. That was not an option when we were buying a house - had to have either air or a swamp cooler.

Steve - mothers day is our official safe-to-plant day. But I have seen a hard frost & snow in the middle-late May. This year spring sprang way too early and many of the roses I purchased suffered horribly with the heat & lack of rain. I've leaned the expensive way to plant them as fast as I humanly can and to make sure I mulch everything heavily. I still ended up losing about 4 freshly bought roses due to the heat & transplant shock & everyone's blooming odd or wrong. Even my old faithful, Mardi Gras is blooming off.. Blooming almost pure pink. Oranges & Lemons is blooming these tiny button sized roses that almost all Oranges & no Lemons. Henry Fonda is blooming tiny roses, and even my wonder Golden Masterpiece is blooming strange roses that look more like an English than a hybrid tea. Very few of my roses seem to be tolerating this heat.. I don't blame them because I'm not tolerating it either. Today it's only about 103deg, and our normal high is like 83. Plus our humidity today is only 5%...an extremely low humidity.

PPal - I grow roses here because everyone told me I couldn't, they wouldn't survive. To me, it's far more beautiful than a blah yard with just grass like everyone else.