I think that when you wrote to him before the sell-off, he may have thought you were trying to buy a band from Eurodesert. He kept getting orders for months for Eurodesert roses and that's why he started stipulating in his updates that we had to use specific titles for our e-mails. I used the wrong heading once and received a reply telling me that all of the bands had been sent to Vintage Gardens.
Many of the roses on my original orders were unavailable simply because he couldn't find them. He had more than 5,000 to go through, after all. Later, when he did find them, sometimes he would remember they had been on one of my earlier orders and sometimes he didn't and they would end up on an updated list. Other things added to the confusion. I had ordered Fragrant Keepsake, for instance. When he dug up the rose marked Fragrant Keepsake on his map, the rose label down by the roots said Big Red. So I didn't get Fragrant Keepsake, but it's possible that someone who had ordered Big Red and didn't receive it suddenly did have a chance to get it or suddenly saw it on an update list and wondered how that had happened.
It really is the biggest rose sale ever, I'm sure, and I'm amazed it went as smoothly as it did. Most of the roses I received from him have already bloomed and only one out of all those roses didn't make it. Only two were mislabeled, and one of those was completely understandable because I had ordered Butterscotch the hybrid tea and I was sent Butterscotch the climber. Imagine if I had bought 112 roses from Vintage or Rogue Valley or Heirloom. How many would have survived? How many would be mislabeled? I already expect at least one or two out of every ten roses from Vintage and Heirloom to die very quickly. The same goes for Rogue Valley, and I expect three or four out of every ten from Rogue Valley to be mislabeled.
