I intend to do what is required to give the roses I've now planted a chance to establish. That will probably be a few more years. I imagine that some of the shy ones will be more productive after a good pruning, which I never do before a rose is at least three years old and growing well. Only Abe Darby would have qualified for that this spring. I'm guessing that Hermosa, Crocus Rose, Tess of the d'Ubervilles and perhaps one or two other roses will be at that point next spring. It took a while to really understand how to avoid losing roses to spring and fall frosts, so almost all of my roses are less than two full seasons old. If I get six years out and am still having years like last year the roses will get ripped out and more xeric plants will take their places.
When I grew many dozens of cultivars successfully in NJ I frequently had a glorious spring garden, but I remember never having more than a token blossom or two in the fall. Most of the remontant roses had been either permanently destroyed by blackspot, or set back too far to bloom. I'm sure they were under-watered and under-fertilized: even the iron-clad HT's like Midas Touch and Electron did not repeat. It was roses like City of York, Constance Spry, Rosa Mundi, and Great Maiden's Blush that did much of the heavy lifting in the garden year after year. A few DA roses pitched in generously during spring, too. Still, spring was glorious enough in the garden to warrant growing roses. To get back to the topic at hand, Knockout was a superlative performer for a number of years, though I'm not sure it repeated for me there, either.
