@CindiKS, Cindi
I have been mulling over your post and thinking about how I really wanted to respond.
In your post you mentioned many variables that could impact the survival of a rose in your garden. That's the truth about roses. There are many, many variables that can make a difference about how a rose performs in different climates.
Some roses are heavy feeders, some are not. Some roses need to be pruned hard, while others will sulk at hard pruning. Some roses are more thirsty than others. The list of variables seems to go on and on. Then soil and climate also impact the performance of plants. No one know it all, but learning about those variables can make a difference in growing roses in your garden.
Knowing the lineage of a rose is only one variable. If you know the lineage contains roses that are generally weaker roses, it gives you an edge about how to care for it, or it tells you that this is an "iffy" rose for your garden.
Yes, I am happy to share lineage information that might explain one of the variables, but it's one voice and only one variable.
I have two roses in my garden that I know are good roses, but they were total duds in my garden, even tho' they had been growing here for over three years. Last spring I moved them to different sites and in one year they have tripled in size in and are more vigorous plants. It's those variables at work. Other than siting, nothing else had changed. I had originally sited them in the coldest micro-climate in my garden.
I had to learn the botany of roses simply because of the people that have been in my rose life. People have been successfully growing roses without that information for centuries. So, if the information I have learned helps someone meet their own gardening goals, that's great.
If I can pass along what I have been taught to help people grow stronger plants and what I have learned from handling almost a 1000 roses over my rose life, then I've met my own personal goal of teaching about roses. There is so much misinformation about how to grow roses in books and on the net, even by people who should know better, that putting the information out there might make a difference in someone's success rate. That's it.
I also experiment a lot in my rose growing based upon theory and let the roses become my teacher. My 'Cardinal Hume' which I pegged a couple of years ago, is now a vigorous shrub rose growing above the fern the was blocking the light to the rose. The rose was reaching for the light and I just helped it along. It's still a shrub rose, but now that it is growing
above the fern, it has leafed out well and is a bloom machine. It was an impulse decision to peg it and I learned something in the process. Again, nothing changed except how I decided to grow the rose. The rose was my teacher.
My experiment in saving the rose ravaged by the dang gopher came from reading the ATP article about vine weevils destroying the roots and the root mass being too small to support the top growth. I just connected a couple of dots and told myself, that is what the gopher had done to the rose ... destroyed the root mass. So I cut the top growth back and am working at growing roots. If I am successful in saving the rose, then I have learned something new.
@Zuzu's tip about Pine-Sol is going to come into play, if I see more gopher activity in that bed. I do plan to line the whole bed with hardware cloth when it is not so hot. I don't want to mess with the roots during the summer months when it is so hot up here.
It's just another one of my experiments.
Five more days and I can stop dis-budding. The roses are pushing buds so fast that I can't keep up, so there is a little curculio damage in the garden. Yeah, another one of my experiments. That's a lot of how I learn about roses.
Smiles,
Lyn
It was a bad one this time. 
Lyn !!
