I dithered about posting it, and after the fact was feeling bad and regretted doing so and thought about editing it all out, because Bill is such a nice guy, a real sweetheart.
But rust is rust.
(Fwiw I think it highly possible that Bill had no information whatsoever about WCRU and its susceptibility when he first started using it. And then I gather that in pretty short order, all of the nurseries had to start spraying in order to ship, and who can evaluate seedlings for resistance or susceptibility under those conditions? So please don't think that I am pointing accusing fingers at Bill here.... it took a great many years (and the right environmental conditions, which are not always the case here (and that probably goes for Bill, too)) for
me to finally wake up and figure out what all of those plants had in common. If I had been spraying my garden like the nursery owners and "everyone else" supposedly was doing, I might never have figured it out, because the rust would have been suppressed.)
While it
may be true that a great many people don't care about rust susceptibility (for the previously stated reasons), at least some of us
do. And at least
some of the "some of us" don't want to spray, for any number of legitimate reasons. And while, if confronted with a rust bucket, we could just dig and throw it out, in the meantime it has infected the rest of our garden. But let's get real - nobody
wants to throw away a plant that they spent good money for, and for some people the loss of that plant (money) is a real financial hit and painful loss.
It was a great many years ago that I remember being at a (Regional?) meeting where Matthew Kaskel talked about hybridizing for rust resistance. I was so fired up and excited by that talk - surely all of the other hybridizers would follow his example!
How naive I was...
