Cliff sent me a bill for my roses. I received 27 of the 53 I had ordered. Mine was the second order to come in, but he had already sold a lot of them when people came in person to dig them up.

The bill is incredibly low because he gave me a 25% discount: The total bill is $737.00, That's $486.00 for the roses and $251.00 for shipping, so you can imagine how big and heavy they were. It works out to an average of $18.00 per rose, or $27.30 per rose plus shipping.

When I think of the little bands I've bought for about the same price, I can't believe what a great opportunity this was.

good shopping ZuZu ;0)
Gloria

My Eurodesert experience was so overwhelmingly positive that I ordered 40 more roses. I'm sure most of them are gone by now, but today I received two: Ragtime and Nina Nadine.

I was busy digging holes and planting roses all day today. I guess I must have been flinging the soil around because it was one of those days when you come inside and notice that your feet are dirtier than your shoes.

Yesterday I received 8 more roses from Cliff:

Arioso
Bob Woolley
Buttercup
Miss Elvis
Picture Perfect
Rebecca Susan
Saturnia
Suffolk

Bringing this up to date, on that second order I subsequently received five more roses: Mrs. Lovell Swisher, Fifi, S.E.A. of Love, Sweet Dreams, and Victoriana. Those came more than a week ago, and since then -- nothing. So it looks as though the roses on my second list were even more popular than the ones on the first. I received only 15 out of 40.

Today, however, I ordered another 42, so we'll see what happens with the third order. He still has about 4,000 roses left, but I'm obviously choosing ones that other rose lovers also wanted.

I know I had said I'd never try to grow another Victoriana after buying three bands, nursing them along for years, and watching them ultimately die without ever growing much at all, but Cliff's roses aren't bands. I expect this one to thrive. It has at least 7 or 8 canes instead of being a tiny one-cane wonder.

This really is the most fun I've had in years. Doesn't that make my life sound pathetic?

I agree if sounds like exceptional fun! If you actually get everything you ordered, will there be room to plant it?

Zuzu - No, that doesn't make your life sound pathetic. You're living a life I can only dream about and can live vicariously through you. Please keep posting your acquisitions! I would have loved to done the same thing, but I have these evil things called bills and, unfortunately, I have to think of what comes first: mortgage/car payments or roses. & DH doesn't agree that roses come first. LOL

Luckily, Toni, I have no car, my mortgage payments have been quite manageable ever since I severed ties with my thieving family and haven't had to refinance the mortgage regularly to compensate for their larcenous habits, and I have no DH to reorder my priorities.

As for enough room to plant everything, Porkpal, well.... not really. I actually ran out of room hundreds of roses ago and started growing them in containers, but this year I've been drastically pruning or removing lots of overgrown shrubs and perennials to make more room. I had determined to move all of my container roses into the ground this year, but many of the roses on my orders from Cliff are duplicates of little band roses that have been growing in containers for two or three years and still look highly unimpressive. I'll use the space for Cliff's roses instead.

I keep thanking Cliff for this opportunity and I have felt almost guilty at times because I'm reaping the silver lining of this terrible thing that happened to him, but yesterday he told me that he was so happy to get my latest order, which includes Creme Abundance. He said he had walked past that rose in his garden that day, noticing that it looked especially wonderful this year, and had felt sad that no one wanted it. He really is genuinely happy about his roses moving to new homes and he even has an idea for a book about them. It's only a remote possibility, but he'd like to take a trip someday, visiting some of the more than 100 gardens where his roses now live, and write about the experience.

Zuzu - That would be awesome of Cliff were able to visit some of the roses that you've adopted & wrote about them.. kinda like a feel-good story of the poor 10-year-old dog in the shelter that no one wanted only to be adopted by a gawdzillionaire who made the dog the sole beneficiary of their estate.

LOL

Hey, most of my cats fit that description. Not that I'm a gawdzillionaire, but they are my designated heirs.

Zuzu - it's not about the $$, it's about the love. As I was just telling DH this morning while taking him to the train station that a former friend of ours who has 50+ cats (number fluctuates).. all her cats line up for laps when we used to go to her house as they're usually starving for attention. Our guys (I don't have that many kitties) are not that bad.. they're not going to die if you don't love them because they *do* get attention.

Oh, poor kitties. Yes, I can imagine having no time to pet 50+ cats because I'm already stretched thin with half that number. Luckily, my cats have formed several loving groups, in which they give each other lots of attention and affection, and there are only a couple of "odd men out" that need me more than the rest do.

It's going to be wonderful to see all these obscure roses in person Zuzu! Wouldn't it be great if Cliff could come up to Vintage someday and drop in to see your garden too?!

We're talking about next May. By then the roses he's sending me this year should be in their glory, and it's a good month to see Rose/Iris/Clematis combinations.

Sure is, that would be real nice!

Cliff is absolutely amazing. He has this operation working like an assembly line now. Remember when I ordered those roses two days ago? Well, six of them were already delivered to my house this morning. I ordered them on the 18th and they were here on the 20th.

Nellie E. Hillock
My Choice
Pearl Harbor
Caprice
President Herbert Hoover
Princess Margaret Rose

I already have the first three, but they were little band roses from Vintage and they've never done that well. They probably don't want to grow on their own roots.

The next one on the list, Caprice, has always been on Vintage's custom order list and never on the available list. When they offered a free custom-rooted rose if you bought eight other roses a couple of years ago, I ordered that one. They still haven't sent it to me, which means it probably can't grow on its own roots either. Cliff sent me one that's so big that it took up one whole big box and the postage on just that rose was over $15.

President Herbert Hoover and Princess Margaret Rose weren't originally on my order, but Cliff sent me photos he had taken of them that day because they were looking so spectacular this year. I told him to add them to my order, of course.

I already have President Herbert Hoover and I love it, but mine's about 35-40 years old and I'll be very happy to have a duplicate in case the first one croaks.

I just looked at the 2 new images of PHH and PMR that Cliff added to HMF, fabulous looking!

Those are the photos he sent me by e-mail. Aren't they amazing?

Today's delivery from Cliff consisted of:

Jean Cote
Lobo
Hector Deane
Stokes
By Appointment
Creme Abundance
Great Expectations
Grey Dawn
Inner Wheel

To say that I'm astonished by the inclusion of Grey Dawn is a gross understatement. I hadn't even bothered to include it in my first two orders because I thought Grey Dawn would have been snapped up on the first day. But here it is, months into the ordering process, and no one else ordered it.

Only three of these nine are new to my garden, but the six I already own are small and weak because they either were damaged by gophers in the days before I planted my roses in gopher cages or arrived as small and inferior band roses.

Some band roses are just so lousy. I only ordered from Mark of Excellence once, but all four of the roses failed to thrive. Amity and Northland sent good bands that all grew into medium-sized bushes and then stopped. They have never reached their full potential. Rogue Valley, Heirloom, and Vintage are a mixed bag. Some get huge and some stay small. Unfortunately, the ones that get huge from those three places often turn out to have been mislabeled.

Today's delivery from Cliff consists of these roses:

Amberlight
Columbus Queen
Just Dreamy
Potton Heritage
Sea Pearl
Starshine
Sweet Harmony

Wow, I can barely keep up with looking all these roses up on HMF, but you have to dig holes and plant them all!