Wow.
Thirteen years ago I ordered a dozen lavender plants from J&P. All but three died. I would learn later that it was because I planted them in heavy clay. A year after the order, J&P called trying to sell me some new (to them) David Austin roses. I mentioned in passing that my lavender were mostly dead. They sent me replacements. Can't remember if I ordered any roses from them after that, nor can I remember why/why not. My guess is that Sun Flare and Mr. Lincoln were from them and they died very quickly.
Toni, your horror story is a lot like a number of stories I've read about J&P a year or two ago. It's going to take them years to earn back the trust of people who used to buy from them regularly. It's a shame because they had just started a rather aggressive fortuniana rootstock program. And long before their precipitous fall they sold well-grown roses.
I do blame them for completely ruining the rose market in the US for, like, five decades by being the 800 lb gorilla of rose marketing and only selling about 15 cultivars in a year. Their narrow focus on roses that grew well only within, say, 200 miles of the Monterrey Peninsula did not serve rose growers in the US well. So there is a sense in which their downfall is a reasonable and warranted consequence of extreme hubris, distorted view of the marketplace, lack of foresight, and an inability to cope with changing tastes.
