Here's the first bloom on my new Desperado from K&M. The red margin got wider as the bloom opened more fully, but it got spotty from the rain, so it didn't look as good as these first photos.
This is a replacement for an own-root plant that has never bloomed in the last six years.
In 2009 I bought four own-root hybrid teas from Almost Heaven, a nursery that is now defunct. I bought them because there were no photos of the roses anywhere at that time -- not even on HMF.com -- and I wanted to fill that photo gap. Unfortunately, three of them took two or three years to bloom, by which time there were photos of all three on HMF.com, so mine were not needed, and the fourth, Desperado, still hasn't bloomed, even though it is still alive.
Almost Heaven's roses were the tiniest things I had ever seen for sale on the Web. The container was more like a glorified thimble than a band. I even took a picture of one of them next to my cat Mambo. You can see that the container is only about two or three times the size of Mambo's front paw.
They're still pretty much the same size, and a couple of them are even smaller than they were initially, but all four are still alive, so I guess that's something.
I wish I had taken a picture of the K&M Desperado next to Mambo when it arrived. I can assure you that it's bigger than the cat.
(and also because I like to go through my plant lists), I went through my list of 584 hybrid teas and found 21 that grow well on their own roots. So, if you want to grow hybrid teas and you have a preference for own-root roses, these are some you might consider:
our daytime temps are still in 50s and 60s, but nighttime temps are near freezing. I'm going to plant them in the ground.
