Good morning, Was wondering if anyone has any info or input on whether you can plant miniature roses in a rose bed outside with hybrid tea roses?? Have a couple of miniature roses that were given to me and was wondering if they would survive being planted around the outside edge of the tea roses. Live in Saginaw,MI 48602 (Zone 5b or 6a??)

Yes, they most certainly can be planted in the same bed as hybrid teas. They should survive anywhere a hybrid tea will survive.

Thank you so much for the reply zuzu! If planted outside is the care/mulching etc. the same as for the tea roses?

1g4bs - I have a bed dedicated to just my minis & I'm in the same zone you are. I just mulch the living snot out of them for the winter & leave it up to Mother Nature. I prefer own-root roses, but minis especially. I water mine a little more often because they *are* tinier & have a smaller root system, so they need a wee bit more care IMO.

if you are talking about the minis that come 4-6 to a pot, usually sold in the winter in grocery stores, i'll wish you luck. I work hard to get those to grow outdoors in regular rose beds. Rosarians in our local rose society tell people not to bother, that they won't make it. I would say half of mine make it. Sometimes I break them into individual pots and let them get a bit bigger before putting them outside.
If you are talking about a miniature rose that is more mature, sold 1 to a pot, possibly with a name on it, then that's no problem. They seem to be even more winter hardy than the larger roses, but maybe that's because since they're so short, they're easy to cover with mulch.

Even the ones that come from grocery stores will grow well in the ground if you take a few precautions. They're planted in some sort of moisture-retaining medium to keep them looking good in the stores, but if you shake off as much of that medium as possible before planting you should have no problem. Cindi's right about separating them if there are several in the pot. And avoid applying any fertilizer to those for a long time after planting. They're pumped full of fertilizer to appeal to customers. Applying any more would be overkill.

good info !! I live in Sanford not far from Shirley and can never get them to live more than 2 seasons may be I will give them a try again may be its me but I can't grow HT's either

Thank you so much to everyone! All the info will prove to be very helpful & is very much appreciated! Having lots of frustration & problems with other areas of my yard (lost SEVERAL iris) & am turning a little "extra" attention to my roses !! Thanks again.

Zuzu, another reason the grocery store (Poulsen, Parade) minis are tough to grow is they only sell them in the winter when we can't plant them outside. I usually pick up 4 or 5 pots of them the week after valentine's day, and they are either dried out, full of spider mites, or soggy with mildew. i never thought about the planting medium as part of the problem! That makes perfect sense.
The challenge is keeping them growing indoors until we can plant them out. I keep them in the sunroom, which has correct humidity and temp, but really I think they need to be under lights.
Boy if i could find them when the weather was warm, I would plant beds full of them, because they are much easier to care for than full size roses. Guess I should say they are NOT tough to grow....they are easy to grow...just not indoors.

Three of my absolute best mini roses have been Parade roses that I picked up at Walmart after Valentine's Day when they were clearanced out 50%. Sure, they were bigger than the little 2pint roses you find at Home Depot/Lowes, but they have done marvelously outside. Almost every little bitty I've gotten from HD/Lowes has croaked.

Right after i posted that we ONLY get them in the winter, I go to the grocery store and there's a display of really gorgeous minis. They have 3 colors to a pot, and several plants in the pot, I think. Super healthy, just got them in. Price was too high for me, though...they wanted 18.99.
Really that's not a bad price, because I think one of those pots had Green Rose in it. I just bought 2 sickly looking full grown minis at Walmart for $8 each, so I "just" got 2 plants for $16 instead of maybe 6-8 plants for $19. The Walmart ones were Wild Plum and Rainbow's End, and they were blooming so I know that is what I got. Those 2 are old favorites of mine.

*pout!!* we NEVER get pretties like that! All we ever get are the unnamed pink/yellow/white/red Parade roses... you so lucky!!

Toni, you may not see them at the grocery store, but I've seen really nice Nor'East miniatures at O'Tooles for as low as $2 (clearance).
Somewhere very recently I saw some nice sized Y2K for $4, can't remember where...

I got my first Red Minimo as one of those grocery store miniatures, with four little newly rooted roses in a pot. I separated them out, potted them up and kept them inside under lights for their first winter, just like I would any newly rooted cutting. I planted them out the following spring and they did fine. I had them under strong lights and washed them with the sink sprayer once a month to control the spider mites.

Oh, BTW, I just found a bloom! Mary Rose has a bloom on her. That's incredibly early here!

Abraham Darby is always my first Austin to bloom. Mary Rose is 2nd. Right now, they are ALL blooming. I really need to work on posting a rose parade because they have never been this pretty.

Usually my first is Harison's Yellow, Austrian Copper, or one of the micro minis such as Cinderella. I was surprised by Mary Rose.

It's been a very very strange spring.

Agnes was usually my first rose when I grew it in NJ, close kin to Harrison's Yellow and Austrian Copper. A good smeller, too. This year it's a race between Abe Darby and Nouveau Monde. Most of the roses in the garden have not yet started to set buds, though.

Nice discussion on minis. I've been wondering where to get them, and I guess I'm still a little uncertain. I've been ordering what I can find from the usual places, but it seems that there are a lot of good minis that are off the market right now. I've been using minis and polyanthas in twos and threes to 'edge' garden paths. Recent additions are All Atwitter, Roxy, Winsome, and Water Lily.

Darn, I was surprised to see that Greenheart Farms, who bought Nor'East Miniature Roses, Tiny Petals and Sequoia miniature roses, really reduced what they are selling wholesale. I knew Greenheart (under the name of Nor'east) had quit selling retail a few years back, but they said that if I wanted minis that used to be carried by the nurseries they bought, to just get my local garden center to order them. And some of my local garden centers were good at doing that. But if I'm interpreting their website correctly, there's a lot of varieties that they aren't carrying anymore.

That is sad news. I knew the first half of the story, but not the second half. A year or two ago when the NorEast mini rose site was up and running, but the retail operation had ceased I was agog with the number of choices they offered. Now I'm even more amazed at how few cultivars are available. And equally as frustrated. I probably don't have space for more than twenty or thirty more minis in the garden, but the options seem so limited. (Googles Miniature Roses...) I notice that John's Miniature Roses offers several hundred cultivars. Are their roses well developed enough to make viable garden plants?

Le Reve (a close relative to Harrison's Yellow) has proven to be the first rose in my garden to bloom. It's in its third year and has one cane that is maybe four feet long and 1/4 inch across. It's got pretty many blooms on it, but I cannot bring myself to photograph it because I have not stripped the grasses and weeds from around its feet yet this year.

Weeds? How shocking!

I call them ground-cover.

Johns miniature roses are part of heirloom. I ordered a few a few years ago... Sent not too bad of roses but they took FOREVER to ship because they were "too small". Uh, if they're not available, don't have them on your website as being available!! Duhhh..