Frillylily ...

Actually, they are not the same class at all. Tea roses are definitely not hardy enough for your zone as Andi said.

Hybrid teas started out as a cross between tea roses and a cross between hybrid perpetuals, which are hardier class of roses and gradually became hybrid teas crossed with hybrid teas as the class grew. The hardier hybrid teas have less tea rose in their linage.

The problem with them growing in colder zones is that in order to increase inventory, the roses were grafted to a rose called 'Dr. Huey' which is marginally hardy to zone 6. If you were to grow a more hardy hybrid tea grafted to multiflora or another root stock that could handle a colder zone, you could grow some hybrid tea roses.

Here is an example from our database

Rose (Rosa 'Souvenir de Baden-Baden')

I agree my zone is not suitable for Hybrid tea roses. I tried for years. The most I can get is a couple of years survival. I know it does not help that I am not willing to do go the distance of a lot of winter protection and if we have a bad winter they are as much as dead.

Every gardener in the lower zones have to come to that conclusion on their own. Some can find a sweet spot that they can have some success. But I know it was hard for me to believe I could not get them to live until I tried. I am satisfied now that they are iffy in my gardens. I have made peace with that fact and happy to grow mini roses, Shrub roses, Knockout roses and Drift roses. I get the same rose fragrant without the expense of replacing dead roses every year.

Yup .. it depends on the rose. The sad part is that for decades they were marketed as if they could grow well in all zones. That's just plain sad.

Lyn they still market them as hardy to our zone. They have rows and rows and rows of roses this year at Lowes . I looked to see which ones they were and the same hybrid teas names that I tried and when we got a bad winter even if I piled leaves 6 feet tall they were dead the next summer.

Believe me I wanted them so bad when I was young I did every thing I read that would make them survive our winter.

Cinta ... truly, some will work in your zone, especially if they are budded to multiflora root stock. Many of the newer ones have been field tested for own root for colder zones, which is even better. Of course, there are so many variables that come into play, there is no guarantee, but that is true for any plant.

Feel free to t-mail me, if one calls your name and I'll be happy to look into the lineage and see if it's worth a gamble, if the information is available. Many of the Kordes roses are now being sold through the big box stores are solid roses own root for colder zones.

The key for success is the root stock, if the rose is budded, or whether it has been tested own root for the colder zones. The rose industry today is very different than it was even ten years ago.

I don't believe in buying roses that need to be given a lot of TLC to survive, so I am not suggesting that you go in a direction that will require a lot of work. You can find hybrid teas that will work in zone 6, just not every hybrid tea.

Hi Lyn! I forgot to mention the perk test - very important. OMG, the xbf hated the perk test. If the water didn't drain guess who had to remove another rock! At the time, I was recovering from a near fatal auto accident. I could barely walk. Planting roses all by myself wasn't possible. He started the rose mania by buying me a Tiffany rose inspired by my beloved Westie of the same name. (love that one, it doesn't love my climate. I am tempted to get one from a Canadian nursery and plant it near the house).

I almost gave up trying to grow roses until I found a wonderful group of rose gardeners on the internet who helped me to learn about roses. We were in another place at the time, but the gang is all here in the rose forum.

These own root roses have been real survivors. They have survived two moves in two years. They were carted around the Poconos in buckets. A couple overwintered in the buckets - guess who hurt her shoulder moving and couldn't get all her roses planted. They survived two polar vortex winters before they even settled into their new homes - the worst two winters in recent memory. I am trying to celebrate the survivors instead of mourning the casualties.

William Baffin, a Canadian Explorer rose - the ultimate survivor.
Carefree Celebration, a Radler rose, a coral colored cousin to his knockouts
Crown Princess Margareta, an Austin rose
Honey Sweet, a Buck rose
Curly, which needs to be moved to a place with more room
Baby Blanket, a Kordes groundcover rose that I am growing as a climber, I nicknamed this one "octobaby" because it roots whenever it touches the ground, cutting it back is like pruning an octopus...but it is disease free and has the cutest pink rosebuds.

These are some new additions from local big box stores that are doing well in my garden.
Queen Elizabeth (grafted)
a Kordes early hardy hybrid tea whose name escapes my overheated brain...
grocery store minis - especially the red and white striped one
Bolero, the floribunda
Orchid Romance, another Radler rose
Rosa Carolina, a native rose from Lowe's native plant collection. i can't wait to see it bloom!

I believe that any gardener can grow roses if she (or he) chooses the right roses to grow!

Before you give up on roses, try one or two that other gardeners in your zone area successfully. People on the regional gardening forums may have suggestions. You may have to acquire them via mail order. Don't give up on roses because the ones you bought at the local big box store died.

Cinta said:Andi, I am going to air layer some Fairy Rose canes this week. I will lay some extra ones and send you a cutting. They root super easy. Some one sent me this one. He said he just cut the cane and stick them in the ground. I do not trust that in my hands I am not good at rooting or growing seeds.

Thank you. I would love a fairy rose! I'll try to find something special to send you in return.

I may have Baby Blanket aka octobaby roses. I think I have a few in "the infirmary" , the garden bed for the roses hopefully recovering from their moves. I am waiting for blooms to be sure they are Baby Blanket and not multiflora. they have similar leaves and growth habits when young. I should try to get some on purpose by layering a couple of canes. I have tried to propagate roses, but haven't been successful yet. Baby Blanket is 'self propagating". I have two and counting in my gardens.....

Back into the heat. I had to come inside to have a bite to eat and cool off. I am going to try to power wash the house and install my trellises. I am borrowing my neighbor;'s power washer that has never been used....I hope it works. I dont' feel like scrubbing the siding and the white plastic trellis.

I will be taking lots of "before" pictures today. I am gardening in the Pocono mountains on a lot "where no one has gardened before". ... not even a lawn....just rocks, tree stumps and weeds....

@GardenQuilts

Hi Andi ...

Good to hear from you

I got a second 'Tiffany' and love it.

Did you grow roots ???

Sorry to read about the accident. I hope you are doing OK, now.

Thank you Andi for all the info. It is so good to hear how people in my zone grow roses and the ones we at least have a chance of survival.

I remember when I first started my gardens in my first house. I paid crazy prices and they died. I had more money than brains back then. Now I have the brains and garden experience and no money.

Thank you Linda for starting this post. I have learned so much. I do not know what I have learned will work out but at least it is more info for this zone than I have seen anywhere.

We have a strange winter. We go from zone 8 to zone 5 in 24 hr space of time. We do not get a lot of snow coverage. Then when we do get snow coverage it thaws and then rain then freeze and many plants end up dying because they have succumb to being in a block of ice. I think many people have more success because they get cold, stay cold and have good snow coverage.

[quote="Cinta"]Thank you Andi for all the info. It is so good to hear how people in my zone grow roses and the ones we at least have a chance of survival.

I remember when I first started my gardens in my first house. I paid crazy prices and they died. I had more money than brains back then. Now I have the brains and garden experience and no money.

Thank you Linda for starting this post. I have learned so much. I do not know what I have learned will work out but at least it is more info for this zone than I have seen anywhere.

I learned a lot as well. I also spent more $ on 1 rosebush then I should of without researching, I paid $25 it was the most expensive one but
I wanted it, it lasted 1 season. Going forward I will do zone research or buy what actually comes back that I already have from experience. Seems I
had better luck with the $5 bare root roses.

Cinta ...

It is always something. Someone told me a long time ago that if we ever waited until we had the perfect garden conditions that all of the gardening books said we must have to grow plants, none of us would ever have gardens. So very, very true.

I'll always think of myself as a novice gardener because I always wonder if I've asked all of the right questions ...

I may know more than the average gardener about roses, but I don't know near as much about other plants. I am going from ground zero there.

This is my first in-ground garden and I have been humbled more times than I want to count. The biggest lesson this garden has taught me is that plants want to grow, so no matter how many mistakes I make, they are going to do their best to grow. It's up to me to figure out what I need to learn to make it easier for them to succeed in my lousy soil.

I live in a place where I cannot easily purchase soil amendments, mulch, etc. and have had to learn a lot about how build my soil so that I can have a viable garden. I have had to go out and glean organic material and haul it back to the garden.

Oh, have mercy ... talk about a learning curve.

I cannot tell you, Cinta, how many times your posts have encouraged me to keep on keeping on ..

At least I haven't been bored.

RoseBlush1, are their any particularly hardy hybrid tea roses that you would recommend?

I want to grow a few hybrid teas for cut flowers. I want a classic , fragrant bud in a bud vase. If I could have a bud in a vase on my desk and another on my night table at the same time, I would be thrilled. A rose similar to Tiffany, but cane hardy in zone 6 would be perfect. Any color is fine with me. I suspect the hardiest are likely to be pink/white/red. I love pink, fine with me!

the rose doesn't have to be a hybrid tea. I would be happy with a beautiful, fragrant bloom from a floribunda, grandflora, "shrub" like Honey Sweet. I should amend my wish for a hardy, fragrant roses suitable for cutting.

I bought a couple of hybrid teas each spring the past two years. My own plants are still getting established. I was seduced by the beautiful blooming rose bushes in the stores. They aren't beautiful now. Two are completely dead, ready to be returned.

My Orchid Romance floribunda is beautiful now! She is my first bloom of the year. I'll show you soon. My phone is recharging and I am overheating at the moment....

Buy your local roses form somewhere that takes refunds! Being able to look up plants on your phone while shopping helps!

If you like hybrid teas, Penny Lane would be a good one for you. Fragrance isn't heavy, at least not this year, but she comes back for me every year without fail and is thriving on just one cane. She's doing so good that I really need to cut her back and train her starting lower to the ground but last time I cut a thriving rose like that I killed it.

Hi Andi ...

Of course, I have a list ... I don't know if you remember, I sent you one when we first started writing and taught you how to establish a rose before planting it out.

Which roses did you buy ? Which ones are you keeping and which ones are you returning ?

btw ... you should have no problems with your 'Queen Elizabeth'

I am looking forward to your photo.

Nope tried Q Elizabeth twice. She lived two years and up and died the third winter. One was a body bag one I ordered from one of the online expensive site.

I found if we had three good winters in a row the roses survived for years. When I moved from my old house I had about 4 good hybrid teas that came back faithfully every year after those 3 good winters and they had a chance to get their roots in good.

Cinta ...

There is a "trick" to growing roses when you live in a challenging climate. Your challenge is cold hardiness. Mine is lousy soil and horrid high summer temps along with a lot of other things that make rose gardening on my property seem like it would be totally impossible, yet I am growing over 100 healthy roses.

Part of it, of course, is selecting the right rose to start with, but the real key is not to plant the rose into the ground until you have grown it up to where it has a large, healthy root mass ... more than just a few anchor roots. A plant with a solid root mass has a better chance of dealing with the challenges that Mother Nature throws at it and surviving. You are giving it a good fighting start. I never plant a rose into the ground until the roots are pushing out of the bottom of a three gallon nursery can. I prefer a five gallon can.

If I had the loamy soil that rose literature recommends for roses, I know the roses would take off sooner, but I know that the roses do fine even tho' I don't see much happening with the top growth for the first couple of years after I've planted them because they are spending most of their energy growing more roots between the rocks in the glacier slurry. When they do take off, they are solid plants.

When I started this garden, my soil was totally dead. It would not even grow weeds. True. I bought my house in January and everything was covered in snow. I thought the house pad level was lawn. HA ! It was covered in decorative rock ! Under all of that rock was what the locals call glacier slurry. Tightly compressed stones with clay and silt between them. The only thing it had going for it was perfect drainage.

I couldn't dig a hole with a pick and didn't know enough to prepare a bed.

It's the same kind of thinking you used when you chose to grow your heucheras in coir pots and over winter them on your patio. You found a way to grow plants you love that works for you.

You won't find this kind of advice on any website or in any rose books, but in my experience in an impossible situation, I have found it does work.

btw ... I have been working on my soil, too. It is no longer dead and has plenty of worms and weeds to prove it ...

Oh Lyn I do not think I would be able to do that. Maybe in my younger, younger days but certainly not now. Moving all those rocks must be a back breaker.

Do you store your roses in pots in the winter for a few years?

I do have awesome soil. When I purchased this house I wonder why with all this wonderful soil why there was nothing but grass and trees and an orchard. I discovered it was the deer, groundhog, rabbits and every animal ready for a meal.

All those trees dropping their leaves made for some really good soil.

Cinta ...

I don't know if I could do it today ... I was so ignorant, I didn't know I couldn't do it. I knew a lot about roses as I lived in a different rose world than the average rose gardener and had been trained by breeders and had done a LOT of studying just to be a novice in that group of experts.

I was gifted with 150 roses as a house warming gift from a rose nursery I had done a favor for and had to go out and find nursery cans for them. I got enough 15 gallon cans free from and landscape company that had just finished a reforestation project for the government and had to buy a pallet of potting soil. I couldn't plant the roses the first year because I had to do the deferred maintenance on the house.

I had never lived in a four season climate and had to over winter the roses outside. I figured out that it takes a large mass longer to freeze than a small mass, so I clustered all of the pots together and put bags of leaves between and around the pots. Night temps up here usually get down to 20F to low teens. I didn't lose any of the roses. So, my theory worked.

The smart thing to do would have been to build raised beds and import soil, but I couldn't buy soil up here back then, so I dug holes. All of the rocks in the glacier slurry are small, none larger than my fist, but tightly compressed together.

However, I have hauled tons of river rocks back to create borders for the beds ... and I don't know how many tons of OM to feed the soil ... a never ending task.

Yes, I had deer problems, too, so my rose garden is limited to the house pad level in back of my house and the roses Mrs. J planted out in front were deer pruned for three years until I could finally get them fenced properly. They are looking wonderful, now. (I gave away a lot of the roses that I had been gifted with that couldn't handle the heat .. )

I joined this site to share my rose knowledge so that others could teach me how to grow other plants. I am still close to ground zero there.

btw .. I bought a new heuchera today ... 'Frosted Violet'. I wish I had more shade.

Cinta ...

The "take away" from my posts on this thread is not about how I had to over come some lousy gardening conditions, but that roses CAN be grown in colder zones.

You just have to compensate for more difficult conditions and select roses that work in those conditions.

Much of the information I am seeing on many of the nursery websites about how to plant roses almost makes me gag because it just doesn't take into consideration the botany of the plant.

There are a lot of right ways to grow roses, but the most important thing to keep in mind is to grow roots first. Give the plant a good base and it has the best chance of survival.

I am not surprised that in your early days you had so many failures because for decades roses were marketed because they had pretty blooms, not because they were good plants. No one could keep them alive for more than a few years even in perfect conditions.

Sorry, if I sounded if I was on a soap box ...

Oh no you are not on a Soap Box. I am soaking up all your knowledge. I have 4 acres I am going to make a garden paradise if it does not kill me first.

If you hang out in the tropical forum you know I am tropical crazy because I like to make my patio tropical paradise in the summer. I store them in the laundry room all winter. I cannot believe I cannot keep roses alive.

I finally gave up when everything was dead except the fairy rose. So I now have 2 red mini roses, Yellow Sunny Knockout, Carpet Rose Amber, Drift Rose popcorn.

Heuchera 'Frosted Violet' is a pretty one. The purple ones seem to not mind sun areas.