You know going thru the list in the database and doing comments, it is surprising to me just how many roses I have shovel pruned. Yes that means dug them up and tossed them out of the garden. But rarely thrown out. Only the sickly ones thrown out. The rest I gave to the guy that does my grass cutting as he said his wife loves roses. He has an entire rose garden by now from my discards!

There was not anything wrong with the ones I tossed. I just plan either did not like them or they just insisted on growing to large for my garden.

I did the same with most of my mislabeled roses from Rogue Valley Roses. Before I gave up on that nursery, it insisted on sending me shrub roses with nondescript pink blooms, even if I had ordered a red hybrid tea or a yellow Austin. I had to give them to a variety of people because there's a limit on the number of insipid pink roses anyone wants to grow.

I don't remember ever having a mislabeled rose. The ones that left here many just insisted on growing too large and that really does not work in my garden. The rest I found that I had thought I would really like them but I did not really like them. A very small amount were sickly with RMV or just failed to thrive. There are so many lovely roses that there is no reason to put up with any that are not up to snuff.

I've received only a few mislabeled roses from Sequoia, Pickering, Vintage Gardens, and Roses Unlimited, but many of the roses I bought from Rogue Valley and Hortico were mislabeled. The worst offender, though, was Heirloom. Half (exactly 50%, in fact!) of the roses I ordered from Heirloom over the years were mislabeled. The worst thing about Heirloom was that they were selling the wrong rose to everyone. It wasn't just a case of grabbing the wrong rose to put in the shipping box. They were growing Albertine and selling it as Gloire de Dijon, for example, and everyone who ordered Buck's September Song, an apricot blend, received a pink rose instead.

Oh, that is terrible. My roses from Heirloom turned out to be correct but then they were not those ones that you ordered. I ordered many Clements roses from them along with others.

Well, they had to know what the Clements roses were!

zuzu said:Well, they had to know what the Clements roses were!

So true!

Whose garden is that on the banner at the moment ??? (The ATP home page banner, that is.)
It's incredible !!!

According to Sue, the banner's owner, it's a public garden in Baden-Baden, Germany. Don't you want to copy every inch of it in your own garden?

Ummmmmm...YEAH !!! lol

Mike, at the bottom of every page is the banner submitter and name of the banner. Click on that link at it takes you to a thread started by that banner on the Site Banners Forum. I added additional photos in the thread.

Adding to the discussion of mislabeled roses, I should say that I have bought roses from a million mail-order nurseries, many of which are now defunct. I've bought many, many roses from Northland Rosarium and never received a single mislabeled one. Some other nurseries that have never sold me mislabeled roses are Palatine, Regan, Garden Valley Ranch, K&M, Burlington, Rosemania, Edmunds, Wayside, Greenmantle, and S&W Greenhouse. I could add another 30 or 40 to this list, but those nurseries are now out of business or don't offer mail-order sales anymore.

Chamblee's sent me one mislabeled rose, but I've bought dozens and dozens of roses from Chamblee's, so that was an anomaly.

Zuzu ...

Mislabeled roses are a fact of life for rose nurseries. They often cannot afford to hire the best people, especially during rose season. I've worked in rose nurseries and know that often the owners of the nurseries are just stretched too thin to be able to cover every shipment. Yes, they set up policies for internal control, but they have to depend on others to carry them out.

I have seen new employees, who were really good workers, screw up the labeling on a whole bench of roses because they simply did not know the roses.

Yes, there are nurseries with poor quality control. There is no doubt of that. We jokingly used to call Heirloom ERRloom Roses. The truth there, was that they really didn't care. The same is true for some other nurseries. However, Heirloom is under new ownership. Will they still have the same kinds of problems ?

The reason Dr. Huey became a root stock used in the rose fields is that someone mislabled the bud wood and instead of planting Ragged Robin, they planted Dr. H. It turns out that Dr. H was the better root stock.

Nurseries that carry a wide selection of roses will always have a higher possibility of error than the nurseries that limit their offerings to a smaller selection of roses available for sale.

Rogue Valley grew too fast and really did not have the proper internal control procedures in place. A perfect recipe for error.

I have seen whole rows of roses in the growing fields mislabled. Those roses were sent to nurseries that didn't know roses as well as they knew other plants in their inventory and sold them under the wrong name.

The real issue is how they handle the customer service when the nursery has been notified that they have sent the wrong plant. To me, that tells the story.

Lyn

I must have been truly lucky thru the years. I have never received an mislabeled rose. And I must say most of the roses I ordered were from Heirloom Roses. Other places ordered Roses Unlimited and J&P. Before it was sold years ago. I even ordered from Palantine and Hortico one time. I must really have gotten lucky. Oh, and once I ordered a whole bunch of Roses from Vintage. Other than that I bought roses locally in the many nurseries that I visited. We seem to have a lot of nurseries here with lovely selections of roses.

From Heirloom I ordered lots of Clements Roses. But not just Clements. Harkness and others too.

Oh the raffle is up.

http://garden.org/ideas/view/d...

Those three roses offered as a prize by Brushwood Nurser would not work in my garden. I would probably take the herb plants from Garden Harvest Supply if I won.

A few days late, but this is what my front yard looked like the morning of Jan 31.



Still have about 2' in the front yard.. no idea what's in the back yard as I haven't gone back there in the rose area. The dog area is pretty melted down, but today was a cold day compared to yesterday. Yesterday it got above 60. Today I don't think it hit over 25. Tomorrow's still chilly, then shoots right back up again. We'll even see some days where the nighttime temps are almost at freezing! Spring's definitely on it's way... I saw a Great Blue Heron flying on Friday afternoon. They're NEVER around in the cold, so I know that our *cold* snaps are gone, too. Can't wait!!

Toni. Winter wunderland!

It has snowed about three inches here. It is done. I swept a path out from my porch to the street. Very light powdery snow.

Hurray! I went thru all 287 pages in the rose database and did comments in any I had not commented on previous to this that I grow or grew. Lots and lots of comments that I added. So I have done all my rose comments that I can do.

That project took about 4 days. Of course, that means I worked on it some and then had other things to do. But good to be finished and good to have added many comments.

Trish really wants to build up the comments in the database. Not just on roses but on everything. She feels this is the place that most people will be able to see the information.