Rita, your good cultural practices and their results are both inspirational and instructional. Adding organic material and attracting earthworms seems to be important everywhere. Here, organic material burns off quickly. I guess I need to work to get bark mulch down annually.
I think you are right about shrub roses. A number of times I have read classification systems for roses where they basically say that shrub roses are roses whose heritage is complicated and whose characteristics do match those of other rose classes. Shrub roses preceded the Knockout brand. They were not as popular, but they were just about as durable. I was very happy with Sally Holmes, for example, which shared many of the best characteristics of Knockout which it grew beside in my NJ garden.
