They won't rot. If it were warmer in Denver they might, but they should be fine. I get Super Thrive at Home Depot. It's generally the cheapest place I've found it. It's also awesome for your houseplants, especially hoya. It comes in a small brown bottle. Kind of pricey, but a little bottle goes a very, very long way if you follow the instructions on the label :)

Well, I'm going to HD tonight to return some wood & to buy this: http://www.homedepot.com/Outdo... to put over Freyja's gravesite. I'll see if I can find it there.

EDIT: Didn't order that arbor as they had this one: http://www.homedepot.com/Outdo... in stock for $129! So I saved $30 by not shipping it. Yay! I was also able to find that SuperThrive for $10.79 for a 4oz bottle, so this morning I set the roses to soak in a bucket w/4 drops (about 3-4 gals of water).

I use Superthrive too to soak my bare roots. A tablespoon or so per bucket but I combine it with Liquid Karma. If I'm out of Liquid Karma I just use Kelp solution,

Yesterday, I planted 11 bare root roses. 9 from David Austin and 2 monster roses from EuroDesert, English Miss and Star of the Nile.
Star of the Nile is one of those in my 'must have list'. I was not expecting EuroD to have any left and I could have settled for a smaller plant, but I was pleasantly surprised (and lucky) when they sent me a freshly dug, matured plant (red bucket in photo).

Edited to add - Toni - don't discard that soaking solution with superthrive. Use it to water your roses after you planted them.

Just a word of caution here: You can soak your new own-root roses and roses grafted onto Dr. Huey as long as you want, but don't do that with roses from Canada or Florida. Multiflora and Fortuniana don't like being soaked. Hortico, in fact, warns that its bare-root roses (grafted onto Multiflora rootstock) should not be soaked for more than 20 minutes and it further warns against using clear water, specifying that the water should be muddy.

I didn't even think they sold Fortuniana roses bareroot. Do they? When I ordered mine from Florida, I was told they don't ship Fortuniana bare root.

You're absolutely right that they don't ship them bare-root, Alan, but some gardeners routinely soak container plants when they're moving them into the ground. I actually did that with a rose today that was grafted on Dr. Huey because the planting medium in the container was so heavy that I wanted to wash every bit of it off the rose. I think the container had been filled with plain garden soil instead of a potting mix. It didn't come from a nursery. It was given to me by a neighbor.

They do that alot here with tree's...but have never saw them do it with a rose. That's sad :(

Alan

J&P supplies bare root roses on fortuniana rootstock. The Sunsprite roses I bought through GVR I'm pretty sure were on fortuniana rootstock; the roots looked different, the roses set leaves earlier that Sunsprite roses from Edmunds, and the color of the new foliage had little or no purple coloration. The tags on the Sunsprites from GVR said they came from J&P. FWIW.

In any case, thanks for the tips on soaking roses, Zuzu. It gives me the rare chance to celebrate the utility of being lazy.

As I recall (and things might have changed), J&P roses were only grafted onto Fortuniana for MerryGro, a nursery in Florida that has since gone out of business. We in the Dave's Garden rose forum bought lots of roses from MerryGro when it was in the process of shutting down. That was the one and only time I bought J&P roses grafted onto Fortuniana.

Incidentally, Fortuniana is an excellent rootstock for California. On the average, my J&P roses from MerryGro are easily twice the size of the J&P roses I bought through the years directly from J&P, which were grafted onto Dr. Huey.

Is it possible, Steve, that the roots on your Sunsprites looked different because they were own-root roses? Sunsprite seems like the type of rose that doesn't need grafting to perform well. J&P didn't climb onto the own-root bandwagon until a comparatively short time ago, but even in the past they never grafted their Simplicity roses or their Meidiland landscape roses because they simply didn't need it.

I can believe that J&P is not retail marketing fortuniana grafted roses now. But they were offering them directly last year. Google produces these results, for example.
http://www.jacksonandperkins.c...
http://www.jacksonandperkins.c...
http://www.jacksonandperkins.c...
It seems reasonable that they should offer them to retailers in limited amounts even as they wind down their fortuniana program.

Yes, but even when they offered Fortuniana, it was limited to Florida and some other southern states. did you read this at the bottom of those pages?

Due to state restrictions this cannot ship to: CAN, AK, AR, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, GU, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MT, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, PR, RI, SD, TN, UT, VI, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY

OK, so where in hell CAN they ship? 40 of the 50 states is blacklisted... Looks like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, & Virginia are the only lucky ones.

Usually it is Arizona that gets the short end of the stick, so that was a pleasant surprise!!

Alan

That is a surprise. I wonder if they thought AR stood for Arizona instead of Arkansas. It seems that Arkansas should be among the southern states where Fortuniana would grow well.

No Fortuniana can be shipped to Arizona, both as a plant and as root stock. So I think it is ok...


Alan

I wonder why they put California on that restricted list. I have bought Fortuniana-grafted roses from K&M with no problem whatsoever. It's a great source, by the way, Alan. He sends big, big roses.

http://www.kandmroses.com/K&M%...

AZ is Arizona. I had to use this site to help me figure it out. :D http://www.usps.com/ncsc/looku...

They claim that they can/could ship to Texas, but all of their grafted roses that I have ever tried to grow seemed to turn into Dr Hueys.

I know AZ is Arizona, Toni. I just thought J&P might not, in view of all the errors they make in other areas of their business.

Zuzu, Yes it is possible that the roots on Sunsprite are its own. I did not examine the roses for a bud union. I just noticed that the roots were definitely not Dr. Huey.

I really can't understand why CA would be on the restricted list unless r. fortuniana is considered a noxious weed in CA. J&P frames the list oddly. Most of the entries are on it not because of state restrictions, I think, but because of freezing temperatures.

After just two years of living in AZ I'm used to thinking of it as having the most restrictive plant importation rituals and laws; but fortunately fortuniana rootstock does not figure among them.