I've found that roses that come from big boxes have either a very gritty soil mix (Lowes) or a barky mix (Home Depot). The gritty soil mix just falls off the plants naturally when I pull them out of the pot, but they seem to do better than the ones that come in the barky mix. Roses grown locally by the nursery are hit & miss. I have stopped buying roses from one nursery because almost 100% of them never make it in my soil. The nursery closest to me is a 75-25% shot because they're greenhouse grown & that means I have to harden them off for almost 2 weeks (dragging them in & out of the garage daily, which is a pain in the patookie 'cuz I'm lazy) as my spring is just way too erratic to direct-plant. The roses that seem to do the best are the ones that come from Weeks directly (they have big Weeks pots). I usually just pull them out of the pot & plop 'em in the ground w/o removing the potting soil that they're in. But one huge disadvantage that a local grower does here is feed everything through troughs that the plants sit in, so there's usually a HUGE mess of roots coming out of the bottom of the pots.
Impossible to get the plant out of the pot w/o destroying all these roots, plus I don't feed every single week like the grower does, so they usually aren't happy with me (the plants, dunno about the grower) and pout for a while. But, with my super short growing season, I tell the plants to suck it up or die!
