Oh, I love Orange Crush & Barbara Streisand. Babs survived for me this past winter and is doing much better this winter. Tuscan Sun.. puny little rose. Don't have any of the others you mentioned.

And if I have roses survive, you should too! :) I have faith in ya! But I'm still leery about RVR.. dunno why. Just wish that I could find more beauties like they have locally!!!

I don't think I have had any roses die this summer. However I have a lot that may as well be dead at the moment as black spot has rendered them leafless. I have great hopes that a dry autumn will revive them. There are also a few obscured by weeds or other plants but I believe they are still alive under there somewhere...

I've lost my share of roses to blackspot. For me they would just grow smaller and smaller each year until they were too short and spindly to tolerate in the garden. I think it's much too dry for BS here. But the flip side is that if I'm not out there two to four days a week watering during dry spells, I might lose much of the garden.

So, Rogue Valley has a new Website design, which is nice for several reasons, but it has one major flaw: You don't know a rose is out of stock until you click on the rose and then click on the size you want.

When the new format was first installed, I was terrifically excited because they suddenly had roses I had been wanting for a long time, and they had many of them in gallons. I was particularly excited to see the gallon-sized Paul Barden roses because I've never been able to grow Rogue Valley's Barden bands. I would assume that the gallons would be past the critical stage and would be viable.

I resisted placing an order for a long time, mainly because of a shortage of space for roses, but I finally decided to bite the bullet and order eight roses. Every single one is out of stock, but there's no clue until you click on the gallon option and you're told it's out of stock, click on the 5-gallon option and learn that it's out of stock, and click on the band and learn that it's out of stock. WTH???? It used to be much easier and less time-consuming to avoid the roses that were out of stock.

Poor design, that's for sure!

There previous site had searches for roses in gallon containers. And I used to be able to figure out how to search on roses by class or color there. I've played with the search widget and I get nada.

I miss the search for gallons too. I've always preferred their gallons and the price is not that much higher than the band price.

It took me a while to figure out how to use the advanced search for anything at all because it's the primitive type with that extra step, where you have to select each criterion and then click on an extra button to add that information to your search criteria before clicking on the search button. Most search engines store that information automatically as you add it. Even after figuring it out, however, the whole thing was fairly useless to me because of the lack of immediately visible availability info.

I'll have to learn how to use what they do have. It will cut down my order from RVR by 80% if I decide to accept only gallons. And I need the discipline!

I'm truly fed up with Rogue Valley and I doubt that I'll ever order anything from them again. Last April I bought five roses from them. As always, none of them bloomed the first season. The roses from Rogue Valley never do, in contrast to the band roses I buy from Northland and Vintage. Tipu's Flame, which I bought in the gallon size because I like it so much, is supposed to look like this:

http://www.helpmefind.com/gard...

A nice red blend with a silver reverse, with beautifully shaped, high-centered blooms. The one from Rogue Valley finally bloomed and it looks like this:



Not even close! The other four I ordered last April still haven't bloomed, but I'm not expecting more than half to be the correct rose.

More than half of the mislabeled roses in my garden came from Rogue Valley.

Well, that sucks. I'm so sorry! :( Can you contact them and complain?

I've contacted them about four of the roses because I was so disappointed. But it's such a hassle that I didn't even bother contacting them about the other 15 or 20 mislabeled ones. I will contact them this time because the last thing I need is another nondescript pink rose.

I received an order this Spring. As luck would have it, the order arrived the day before our last furious storm of the season, with nighttime temps dipping into the mid teens. Like an idiot, I planted half the order in 40mph winds, knowing it would get freezing cold. The roses I planted all froze. My bad. Some are not dead, however.

What surprised me about the order was the number of plants that I would have characterized as "barely rooted cuttings." Maybe a third of the order was. That's a big surprise to me since I ordered these in September of last year. For example, Konigin von Danemark was not yet two inches tall. I took delivery of about 16 roses. Between the freeze and the small size I'm betting that I lose fully half of them. Perhaps more. That puts RVR's batting average below my threshold. I will only buy gallons from them in the future. That limits my order size to maybe one per year.

Well, I sent Rogue Valley a message to tell them they sent me a pink rose instead of Tipu's Flame and I attached a photo of the pink rose. That was on April 28th and they never responded. Maybe they think I just like to send people photos.

Yeah. I'm sure it's the pink sport of Tipu's flame. Or maybe it's Tiffany.

I tried the alphabetical thing too, Steve, after they sent me Lyric for Leander, so I know just what you mean.

I just ordered a rose that I needed to replace from Rogue Valley hope it is not the wrong rose!
Duchesse de Buccleigh (spelling will be corrected later) Duchesse de Buccleugh

http://www.helpmefind.com/gard...

They never did answer my request for a replacement of Tipu's Flame. I've ordered one from Cliff, but if he doesn't send it, I'll write to Rogue Valley again.

--HYPOCRISY ALERT--

I know I said I wouldn't be buying any bands after receiving Cliff's beautiful monsters in the mail, and especially bands from Rogue Valley because of all the mislabeling.

But then they started offering Tootsie, a rose I've always wanted, so I ordered it, hoping it would be the real Tootsie, and then I had to order three more, of course, so that I could qualify for the free named rose and the free mystery rose.

The package arrived today and all of the bands look great. Best of all, Tootsie already has a bloom on it and it is the real Tootsie. They sent all of my first choices with no substitutions, so I received:

Tootsie
Comtesse de Segur
Souvenir du President Carnot
and Lady of the Mist

I already have Lady of the Mist, but it's in a bad spot and instead of moving it, which is such a hassle when roses are planted in gopher cages, I'd rather plant a second one in a good spot.

My free rose is Incantation. I've already killed two of these Incantation bands from Rogue Valley, but maybe the third time's a charm. Besides, I didn't have to pay for this one.

I also bought two Eurodesert bands from Vintage last week: Red Intuition and Mullem. I had ordered them from Cliff, but they were gone from his garden, so I took a chance and ordered the bands. They are spectacular -- much nicer than most of Vintage's own bands.

LOL, I like the alert part!!

Oh goodness, future eyecandy!!! That Lady of the Mist isn't at all what I expected.. I was expecting a light pink/mauve, not coral orange!!