I was taking a moment to consider roses that I might order for next season and my attention fell on Duchesse d'Auerstadt. HMF helped me learn that this rose is available as a band from VG for $45 and as a two gallon potted plant (sans pot) from Greenmantle Nursery for $18 plus a lot for postage. So the question became whether to order from Greenmantle. It's something I've not done. I like their folksy website and their total disregard for what's the current rage in roses. And the fact that this might be the only place in the US where I can buy Tipsy Imperial Concubine as well as Mrs John Laing, My Choice, Rosemary Rose, Fruhlingsmorgen, and Magenta. I might be interested in their apple trees, too.

So, are their plants any good? Do they ship on time? Do they have trouble with labeling? Or with committing to send plants they've already sold to someone else?

Too bad their Grey Pearl isn't offered.. they do have a couple that I'd be interested in myself. RU has Tipsy Imperial Concubine sometimes...

oooh they have a wonderful list of roses. if you buy at least a couple, shipping isn't too bad. Four roses would come out to $23 each with postage. $22.40 on 5.....so it's less than Palatine for my zip code.
I'm anxious to hear the answers to Steve's questions about the company.

Tipsy Imperial Concubine is interesting based on name alone, but the photo looks beautiful.

Cindi - I've tried to order it from RU for like 3 years running based 100% on the name only.

I have ordered roses from Greenmantle. In fact, Tipsy Imperial Concubine was one of them. Here's my photo of one of the blooms.

Rose (Rosa 'Tipsy Imperial Concubine')

All of my roses from Greenmantle are growing happily and are quite large now. The roses arrive, as Steve said, sans pot. The root ball is wrapped in plastic. I might have a photo somewhere of a new shipment of Greenmantle roses. I'll try to find it. They're much, much larger than Vintage band roses.

The best thing about buying these larger and older rose bushes from Greenmantle is that the roses have been growing long enough to bloom and to prove they're the right rose. No possibility of mislabeling, which is rapidly becoming my biggest complaint about mail-order roses. Two more of my latest Rogue Valley purchases have proved to be the wrong rose.

Thanks for the input, Zuzu.

I hope to settle on a list by the time my printer ink arrives and I can print their order forms.

Thank you for mentioning this nursery, Steve. I had never heard of it before. I've spent a few hours reading their website pages and I have to say they have changed my views on roses.
One argument they make is about buying non-remontant roses. They point out that we don't think twice about planting a lilac that only blooms once a year, so why expect a rose to do more? Today i saw a lilac bush in full bloom. it was an old variety, a huge old shrub, and it was fully blooming. I think our cool wet weather last week fooled some plants into thinking it is spring. Of course i was gone and missed the cool rain.
Anyway, I'm going through their extensive lists and looking more at the Damasks, Centifolias, Bourbons and maybe a few chinas. I love the older forms, which is why I love the Austin roses so much. "Reproduction" roses, in their words. Reproduction with improvements.
Most of the Chinas are listed as zone 7 and warmer. Has anyone had good experience with them in zone 6?

The argument in favor of non-remontant roses is a good one, I admit, but I've been digging out most of my lilacs and other once-blooming shrubs and trees to make room for reblooming roses, so it doesn't work for me. I'd rather have the rebloom. I'm also going to avoid OGRs from now on because they have so little pest and disease resistance. Some diseases -- powdery mildew, for instance -- strike only the OGRs in my garden. When hybridizers started creating modern roses, they weren't just striving for reblooming capability and more interesting colors. They also were striving to create roses with greater resistance to pests and diseases.

In my climate, the Austin roses remain the absolute healthiest roses. They must like our dry air, because I know people from other regions complain about blackspot on english roses.
i was looking at the OGRs as something I could plant down by our pond to replace the forsythia that died in the heat. I would not care how large they grew in that location.
One year, i made up a wish list of roses using HMF's search criteria. I had a list of roses that were thornless, had strong scent, repeat blooming, hardy to zone 6, and disease resistant. I swore those were the only roses i would buy from then on.
Every time I get another deep scratch, i wish I had followed that list.
I'm still planting lilacs because they grow fast enough to create a barrier between my yard and the street.
I'm still buying viburnums because they have the lovely berries, but most of mine look pretty bad from the heat and drought. It looks like I did lose a few of them.

Austins grow well here too. So do Kordes roses. I've often said that I'd grow nothing but Austins and Kordes Fairy Tale roses if I ever had to move to a place with a smaller garden.

Virtually every rose in my garden gets black spot. The Buck roses are the worst in that respect. I kept a log of BS-free roses one year and ultimately had to remove every rose from the list as the year went on, with the exception of 'Playboy,' which never had a single spot. Ping Lim's roses are also virtually immune to black spot in my garden. exhibiting only a few mild symptoms during the year.

Zuzu - how about I trade you your perfect weather year 'round & you can have my lack of blackspot? I think I had a total of .. 35? leaves this year with blackspot on them. That's it. Of course, had no moisture to develop blackspot with.

Thanks for the offer, but if I had no moisture, I would water every day (as I do now from April to November), so I probably still would have the problem. Besides, black spot doesn't bother me. I just accept it as a fact of life. It can't kill the rose bush and it doesn't affect the blooms. I'm a flower floozie, so I don't care what the leaves look like.

David Austin in his early book titled Old Roses has a lot of good things to say about them, pointing out how " they thrive on neglect." What I took away from that was that in order for modern roses to bloom generously and repeatedly, they need a lot of feeding. This it doubly true if one is pruning a rose severely in order to promote bloom. I like the idea of roses being able to fend for themselves, even if I obsess over them as they settle in.

It seems to me that there are roses that bloom once but manage to produce more blossoms than the typical hybrid tea rose does in its lifetime in a garden. Ballerina comes to mind (I've grown it in two zip codes and have never seen it repeat) ditto Sea Foam. When I grew Great Maiden's Blush in NJ it covered itself in flowers for a glorious two or three weeks. I've seen it blooming beside a full-grown Cardinal Richelieu that was also in full bloom and the pair took my breath away. Not a pair of roses for a small garden. And then there is Ferdy. It's a modern rose, but a once-bloomer that does literally cover itself in bloom. It's the once-flowering climbers and ramblers can be even more glorious. Sometimes I think it is better for a plant to put on a big show, then disappear gracefully into the background than to keep on looking just a bit silly as it doles out a single flower at a time. And I'm afraid I care a lot about how plant foliage works in the garden. I've never chosen a rose solely on that basis; but it does affect my decisions about placement and shovel pruning. I love viburnums for their foliage, too.

I've been pleasantly surprised by a few repeat-flowering roses. Rainbow Sorbet has produced flowers continuously since May, and it has been pretty generous with the display. So have Coral Crown and Europeana. Crocus Rose has had two conspicuous flushes of flowers and has not been without a bloom since May. Things go downhill from there. For example, Legends - in it's first year has produced one rose every other week. Duftzauber 84 which is in its second year and is more than three feet across has had two flushes of bloom, each of which produced about eight perfect roses. But the roses opened quickly and fell from the plant in about two days. So I've gotten thirty two bloom-days out of it. It's the most generous HT bloomer I have. Ispahan, though, probably produced eighty or a hundred and twenty blossoms in May. The flowers lingered for weeks. If we said the average flower lasted eight days, then Ispahan produced about (8x100) eight hundred bloom-days: almost thirty times the garden impact of my best HT rose! Why do I not fill my garden with Ispahan roses? I like to have roses through the summer and early fall. But I do think that sometimes you actually get more bang for the buck (flower impact for the space used) with old garden roses or other once-blooming plants. As much as I love hybrid tea rose blossoms individually, the more I learn about roses, the more reservations I have about using them as garden plants.

As for disease resistance, one of the many reasons I left the Northeast was that blackspot definitely does kill roses there. It kills most hybrid teas. It killed most of the minis I planted. It killed some floribundas. Most old roses and modern shrubs did fine. There was not much problem with powdery mildew, gratefully. I understand that bourbon roses tend to be among the most disease-prone roses. Except for bourbons, I'd expect most other old roses to be far superior to most of the modern roses - especially the ones bred on the west coast during mid-century. Albas, Gallicas, and Damasks that I have grown have been almost completely bulletproof. It may very well be that modern roses - especially the glossy-leafed ones bred on the west coast - are more resistant to mildew. My guess is that the Kordes roses would tend to be better than the Meilland ones as disease resistance goes. But, then, I was surprised to see Folklore's leaves being deformed by the early onset of powdery mildew recently. I guess you can use generalizations to help simplify the search process, but I suppose the actual attributes of the rose cultivar matter more.