I love your tone. Both of you made me laugh out loud several times, especially in the discussion of pleasantries.
I want to applaud Trish for dealing with black spot in the correct way: pulling off the affected leaves instead of using chemical fungicides. Black spot has never killed a rose, so even if all of the leaves have to be removed, the next set of leaves will be green and lovely.
Two bits of misinformation I have to address: Trish, the writer of the Roses Week articles on rose pests and rose diseases was not Jeremy. It was Calsurf73 (aka JasperDale, aka Mike). Dave, our rose database does not include every known rose cultivar. I've avoided adding cultivars that are no longer available in commerce and are no longer on display in any public gardens. The helpmefind.com website lists 44,000 cultivars, for example, and we list only 5,400. We probably could add another 30,000 or 40,000 cultivars, but most of them would be alternative names for the same cutlivars or extinct or obsolete roses for which we'd most likely never have any photos or much information.
