Thanks, Cindi. I guess I've failed with enough $15 roses that a $4 annual will seem like a great deal. My five year old Baronne Prevost has not made so many roses in its lifetime as I can count on one of those petunias!
Toni, Porkpal is right. I don't have much need of zone 4 cold hardiness in roses, but I'm thinking maybe Joanne might. I think you will find that a number of the rugosa-acicularis hybrids developed in Canada are rated at HMF to zone 2b. William Baffin, for example. I did not check my recommendations against HMF hardiness listings, though.
I will suggest, though, that there are precious few roses rated to zone 7 that survive spring's yo-yo weather here in zone 7b without special care. And there are a lot of roses rated to zone 6 that fail in spring, too. It may be that once I adopt the right cultural practices to deal with spring freeze-thaw cycling I'll be able to grow some zone 7 roses. My guess is that I will plant Lady Hillingdon for many years out, piling ever more mulch on the rose until either it survives spring weather or the pile becomes more than about two feet high. So far I haven't been using mulch to protect roses because I really don't like extra work. We can get very dry winters here sometimes, For some time I didn't understand the damage dry winter soil could do to roses. I know now that if the ground is bone-dry in February and March, I need to water a few times in each month. And if roses are doing anything at all in April (and they are usually setting leaves) I need to water a few times per week.
John Davis waits to set leaves until long after other roses do. It's more carefully programmed not to be fooled by early spring weather. That's useful behavior in Ontario or Alberta. Sadly, what that means for it here is that in most normal years it will be setting leaves at precisely the time the ground is most likely to be completely dried out. It's not going to be happy here until it has roots set very very deeply. They grow about an inch a year, so I'm thinking I'm going to need to tend this rose for several decades if it is to thrive here. There are not too many others from the same series I would try to grow here; one of the shortcomings of too many is a lack of fragrance. I do find I'm slowly accumulating a few Buck roses, though.
