I agree with Cindi. That is a spectacular photo, Margie!

Thank you, thank you. I took those photos about 1 1/2 weeks ago. Yesterday I was at a hospital with my husband - he had some tests done. The admitting lady had a picture of the Pope on the wall. I admired it. She told me that a priest handed the photos of the Pope out to the hospital staff. And she gave me the beautiful photo.
Last week we had a lot of rain and extremely windy here for a few days ( it was pretty bad). I ventured out in the storm as I had to cut off some of the tall stems on the roses because they were bent at 90 degree angles, waving all over. I was just out there in the garden staining/painting some lattice for a couple of climbers. And I can see buds on Pope John Paul II, Easy does It, Charles De Gaulle, Paradise, Bonica, Poisden, Koko Loco etc. etc. I see 2 hips on Red Corsair. Has anyone on this forum ever planted the seeds from hips? Any success?

Here are some of today's late bloomers that weren't already pictured in the "Last Gasp" thread.

Baronne Edmond de Rothschild, Compassion, and Condesa de Sastago



Felicia, Frederic Mistral, and Jasmina



Mother of Pearl, an unidentified bright-orange groundcover rose, and Tuscan Sun

Zuzu ...

Your NOID orange rose reminds me of 'Golden Eye'

http://www.helpmefind.com/rose...

I don't know if that is the right ID, but I thought I would put it out there.

Thanks for the suggestion, Lyn. It does look like Golden Eye, but it's too old to be the same rose. Golden Eye was bred in 1997 and introduced in 2004, but I've had my rose for at least 25 years.

Hurray, I just finished spraying the roses with the usual systemic fungicide. I was way late in my spraying. Unlike all season when I was very good doing them each two weeks and not missing. But at least I got them this one last time. This should be it for the season.

Enjoying everyone's end of the season blooms, and a nice fall display here too. Cooler temps is bringing nice colors.

Wind broke a big cane off of Golden Fairy Tale from the base of the plant. That cane has to be 11-12' long! How tall does a rose need to be to be considered a climber? I'm really liking the wild, octopus-like growth, but don't want it subjected to further damage. I have held off from pruning because I don't want to encourage growth right now. I'm wondering if I might be seeing a climbing sport of GFT? Not sure how to deal with this beast...

Neal ....

Common practice for centuries has been to prune off canes that might be damaged by winter storms.

I do what I call a "snow tipping" prune in fall because at my elevation, when we get snow, it is wet and heavy. I open up the canopy of the rose so that the snow falls through the plant. It's my way of deciding where the cane will break rather than to allow Mother nature to make that decision ..

This kind of pruning at this time of year does not encourage growth. When your temps drop, the photosynthetic activity in plant also drops. Modern roses store their nutrients in their canes to get them through winter, so this is not a hard pruning because you would be robbing the plant of food that it needs to survive. With a vigorous rose, this is not too much of a problem. It's more like lacing a tree.

The reason the rose is such a monster for you is that you are growing it in a kinder climate than the climate where it was bred and tested. So while references may say it will grow to four feet that information came from a climate where the rose was bred. If a rose is happy, it will often grow much larger in a friendlier climate.

Just for fun, you might just stick one of those canes you cut off into the ground and leave it. You may end up with another rose ...

Smiles,
Lyn

Neal, is your Golden Fairy Tale in sun or part shade? My Golden and now my Caramella are on the east side of the house and both got too huge for the space. I killed Golden in trying to move it, and I need to pull Caramella out, but I'm thinking I need to wait until it shuts down in November. They both bloomed profusely, so I didn't think the east planting affected them too much. In fact, every rose on the east side is now huge, but the others are supposed to be climbers.
Looks like I'll need to kill off grass and set up a whole new bed for the big roses I'm moving.
One rose that took off this year that is staying in place is Susan Williams Ellis. Wow that is a great rose. The scent is probably the best of all my roses, beating out Mr,. Lincoln, McCartney rose, MEmorial Day, Fragrant Cloud!

Lyn, we cross posted, and I think you are on to something there! It seems like ALL my Kordes and Fairy Tale roses specifically have grown larger than the catalog predicts. Even my Austins get larger. I wouldn't say my climate is kind, nor Neal's. BUT we do have a longer growing season and more daylight.
Edit: our temps are in the mid 80s this whole week. No real slowdown in sight for us! Nights have been cool, low 50s, high 40s.
Sorry to see the northern half of Kansas is getting frost warnings for later this week. Not us!
Most years, I am still gardening in the middle of November.

Hi Cindi ....

To a rose, a longer growing season and more daylight is a kinder climate ... It's not just about cold or hot temps.

The tipping point for photosynthesis in a rose is 70F. So anytime your day temps have dropped lower, your rose is no longer really producing food for the plant ... or not much. You don't have to wait until it completely goes dormant. I think moving a rose at this time of year is the one time you can leave the top growth larger than the root mass, because the nutrients the rose needs is stored in the canes and the plant needs those resources.

Studies have shown that roses will grow roots even when temps are down to -15F and the soil is frozen, but it is not vigorous growth. It still counts. Feeding the rose in winter really doesn't benefit the plant because all cellular activity has slowed down, so you can't compensate for the loss of the nutrients in the canes.

Good luck moving your rose.

Smiles,
Lyn

Funny, I'd never thought of this climate as particularly rose friendly, but that would explain why Kordes roses perform so well here. We've had one day thus far that the temp didn't reach 70, but nights are dipping down into the low 40s.

The good thing is I intended for Golden Fairy Tale to be the star of the show in that bed, and it isn't disappointing!

Cindi, where did you get Susan Williams Ellis?

If a rose is genetically programmed to grow into a large plant and it has the resources to to put on growth, it is going to grow. Trying to keeping it smaller by pruning is only working against its genetic programming, so those roses need to be sited where they have room to be large plants to get the bloom performance you are seeking.

The night temps really don't play a role until they have dropped below freezing.

You still have a longer growing season and more daylight hours that gives the rose the resources it needs to keep putting on growth. Your pruning objective at this time is just to mitigate possible damage by storms.

Your plant is a juvenile rose and is not as strong as it will be the longer it is in the ground. It's root mass will increase and will provide more support to the top growth as it becomes more mature. Then your pruning objectives will change so that you are always rejuvenating the plant. That's another topic.

Kordes built their rose business by breeding roses for parks that required little maintenance. I would not be surprised to find some of those roses in the lineage of the roses they are introducing today.

Smiles,
Lyn

Cindi, I forgot to answer your question earlier- Golden Fairy Tale gets at least 6 hours of direct sun a day. I'm going to be looking for some kind of trellis for it- it looks like a climber that has been planted in the middle of a bed without support.

Lyn, I've grown so accustomed to roses never reaching the listed height, it has been a shocker for a first year plant to double the expected height.

Neal ...

When people first started grown Austin's roses in San Diego, they were total monsters that always out grew their allotted space. My rose mentor, Kim Rupert, and I talked about this a lot at the time. Kim is always teaching the botany of the plant and the lineage of the plant. He also teaches about the "why" of how roses do what they do.

In the early years, Austin disclosed the parentage of the roses he introduced, but then started registering them as "seedling x seedling" because he didn't want others to follow the same breeding line he was using.

One of the monster roses was 'Jude the Obscure'.

Rose (Rosa 'Jude the Obscure')

In the registration and the patent, the rose was only supposed to grow to four feet. In San Diego, it grew much, much larger.

I checked the lineage of the rose and found that it contained at least four climbers going back just three generations and at least two more roses with tall/large growth habits, so the genes are there for the rose to be a large rose. In England, it stayed a mannerly four feet and that was how it was registered.

Austin did not state that any of his roses could be used as climbers until after he opened his nursery in Texas and saw how large the plants grew.

Is your rose free standing or located near a structure ?

Smiles,
Lyn

Neal, I ordered Susan Williams Ellis from Austin in Texas a few years back. All of my Austins grow large, even "smaller" ones such as Tamora .
The funny thing is, the tallest rose in the garden right now is a mini, Music Box. It is easily 8 feet tall. Both Westerland and Autumn Sunset died back so much over last winter that they had to start all over, and this year only reached 7 feet or so.
My Fairy Tale roses billow out instead of climbing up. I had not considered using a trellis with them, but that might be a solution.
My roses are loaded with buds right now. I'll need to water them tomorrow since it's been so windy and hot! I've gotten behind on gardening because I've devoted more than a few hours watching Royals baseball.
We're winning again tonight, yay!

Lyn, you've really got me thinking now- thanks! Very interesting, and what I'm seeing is making sense. Also reminds me I need to get back into trying Austins again. I'd stopped during the RRD epidemic years in my garden, and had tried too few to get a good idea of them.

I've been browsing sources for grafted Austin roses.

My Golden Fairy Tale is free standing, and is reminding me of an octopus.

Thanks, Cindi. Do you grow Westerland and Autumn Sunset on trellises?

Neal ...

There are some good Austin Ross. I don't know how well they grow own root, so looking for grafted makes sense.

Margy NY reminded me of something last night that is another variable that can play into the larger growth of the Kordes roses from Palentine. A while back she called NewFlora, Kordes representative in the US, and found out that all of the roses sold by Kordes since 2002 were tested own root. That tells me they were bred and tested to perform well own root vs the standard procedure used in the US for decades where everything was tested budded.

As Zuzu has pointed out, when an own root plant is grafted to a more vigorous root stock, the roses will be more vigorous and larger than they were own root. Of course, there are always exceptions ... I think she mentioned 'Queen Elizabeth' as an example.

Connecting the dots ... when Palentine grafts a rose that grows well own root, it gives the plant more resources with a stronger root stock, most likely, it will grow larger and more vigorously. Another variable. I think Margie may be onto something.

For a free standing rose, you might try the method of support the Sacramento Historical Cemetery Rose Garden volunteers have used to support roses with the growth habit you describe. They use a "corral" built under and around the rose to lift the canes up so that they are not flopping all over the ground. I think their initial experiment was to build the structure using wood, and when they found it worked, they have replaced the wooden corrals with steel structures. This allows the rose to grow as large as it wants to grow and these roses seem to be more floriferous than if they pruned it down to the size needed to keep the paths clear in the cemetery. The canes of the rose drape down and cover the support, so you don't even see it.

I haven't been down to Sacramento in years and haven't actually seen the roses treated this way and don't know if they do any kind of special pruning to clean up the roses. I can contact someone who volunteers at the garden for more information or you can experiment on your own. I think this will will work better than a trellis in that it provides support all the way around the rose.

Just more to think about.

Smiles,
Lyn

I wonder if one used a different type of rootstock would the end results be different???