If I am right, I know a little bit about your location and soil, Miguel. The best place to purchase roses for you would be either Pickering nurseries or Palatine roses. Check out the very disease resistant varieties (ADR winners). Just do not accept at face value that those roses stay at 2-3 feet hight in NC, because they will grow to 4-4 ' tall and wide.

If you can handle a climber Laguna would be a perfect winner, very fragrant and very healthy but very thorny. I grow it for years and I didn't have to spray it ever. It needs a tuteur or obelisk for support. Coral pink color and very fragrant short climber (rather a tall bush)) is Compassion is an excellent rose as well and cut flower.

On the other hand, I seem to remember that your favorite color in roses were apricot or yellow, maybe even orange.
Kordes Aloha (Hawaii) is a climber in colors you may like. If you have patience you can get Papi Delbard from Roses Unlimited in 1 gallon pot and by the second year it will be a small climber with enormous blooms in every hue of pink-apricot and orange you can imagine. It is no spray for me in coastal NC but thrips love him.

Warm Wishes aka Sunset Celebration is a HT, but quite healthy, great and productive rose about 5'.
In floribunda or shrub category: Floral Fairy tale is a very healthy dense bush with apricot colored roses, same is true of Caramel Fairy tale.
Abraham Darby is very fragrant but needs spraying.

Or, check out the photos of William Allen Richardson (tea-noisette)on Helpmefind/roses; mine is about a 8x8 bush and the flowers are absolutely gorgeous, even from a distance. Alas, I don't remember, where I got this one; probably from Ashdown, but they gone out from business.

Before I try to guess what you want, why don't you tell us more about the size(s) and color(s) you are looking for?

Hi ceterum, yep I am Miguel the clematis fanatic here. Didn't know you lived in NC.

Hi Michaelg. Nice to see another fellow North Carolinian here. I live between Winston-Salem and Greensboro in a small town called Kernersville.

Okay, perhaps I was not very implicit in my description of what I am looking for, but then again I did say I was a neophyte with roses for the most part and perhaps I don't really know what I am looking for :). What I envisage is a small mounding shrub rose that will be no more than 3 feet tall and that will spread out perhaps the same distance. Pruning won't be a problem to keep it in bounds for me as long as it won't affect the rose. I saw a rose this weekend on P. Allen Smith that was called The Fairy that I liked as far as size but not the fact that there was no fragrance and the color didn't really do much for me. My color preferences are orange/apricot and purple if there are such beasts and fragrance would be a plus. Disease resistance is a big plus since I am not going to spray!

Hope that helps clarify matters.

Buck roses in apricot : Folksinger, Serendipity, Prairie sunrise, The first two are taller but are very clean, the third one is a slow grower and will blackspot in the first year or two but gets cleaner.

Dark purples: Prospero or The Prince (Austins) - the latter is sinfully fragrant, but Prospero is healthier. You better plant two or three together if you want a mounding shrub effect. I would not plant The prince in full sun, but in a location where it gets shade in the afternoon. There is more difficult to find clean purple roses, they are usually very bad in blackspot territory.

Earth Song could be kept as small as 4 x 3 with pruning.

The Fawn is a no-spray rose with low, mounded habit-- very nice, but the color is pale. Gruss an Aachen is also pale and definitely needs spraying here in Asheville.

A Buck rose that meets your specs is Winter Sunset. Buds are orange sherbet color but fade quickly to off-white, which might disqualify it for your purpose in a designed garden. Resistant and fairly fragrant. Best as a cut flower cut in tight bud.

Serendipity is very tall for me, and very pale.

If you don't know about HelpMeFind, go there for pics and information.

Interesting, Michael, Grussi is a no spray rose here in this blackspot inferno close to the coast.

Is there anyone who grows Sweet Pea in NC, SC, or VA? It is a nice, mounding shrub but since it was hybridized by George M. Shoup, Antique Rose Emporium owner in Texas, I wonder how this rose does in terms of blackspot in humid areas.

I don't grow it, but there is a polyantha called Mothersday with a variation that Pickering calls orange Mothersday. It's usually mentioned as disease resistant. The buds are double and described as fragrant.

The more I think about it the more I believe that, Miguel, you need a rose from the polyantha class (Fairy belongs to that class, too) if you want a mounding or ground hugging shrub. The problem is that not many polyanthas are fragrant, but there are some: Clotilde Soupert is very fragrant and Pearle d'Or is also fragrant.

Or, you may go for a floribunda rose with some strong polyantha parentage but parentage tracking is not so easy nowadays. In any case, you rather want a rose described as 'spreading', 'shrubby', 'mounding' instead of 'upright', 'HT type' growth.

For purples, I have seen Ebb Tide and Midnight Blue and for an orange colored one a variety called Louise Clements. The info on them says they are all highly fragrant and disease resistance. Does anyone have any experience with them?

Also how about Heirloom Roses as a sources?

I do like Winter Sunset as well. Too many choices!!! This is worse than clematis!! LOL

I had Louis Clements. It did need spraying and then it died on me last winter. I don't think that because it was too cold but because the temperature fluctuated too much too often. I got her from Roses Unlimited in 1 gallon and it was still a relatively small plant in its 3rd year. Heirloom has an excellent reputation though I have no personal experience with them.

Ebb Tide
Burgundy Iceberg
Julia Child
Safrano
Shreveport
Folksinger

Several I ruled out immediately since I am an intense color freak and love the darker colored roses. Also I was unsure if the paler colored roses would bleach out like some of my lighter colore clematis do here in my garden. Some were also too large although pruning would probably have helped take care of that issue.

I was torn between Ebb Tide since it was highly recommended on the Chamblees site and Julia Child. The main drawback I saw to Julia Child was that although she is highly fragrance, the fragrance was described as strong licorice candy and spice. Not being one who is overly fond of licorice tipped the scales in favor of Ebb Tide.

Ebb Tide has been ordered and I await its shipment the latter part of April! Gives me plenty of time to prep the planting site. LOL

Thanks all!

I keep it around for a sentimental reason, and because it's foliage always looks pristine -- even when I allow the spray schedule to slip.

Ceterum, another experiment to see if it acts the same in my climate. I am going to be planting it in full sun as I don't have a spot for it where it would get adequate sun otherwise. We will see how its color holds up in full sun. I did let them know at Chamblees that the rose would be planted in full sun and they grow it there in Texas and claim it is a favorite for fragrance there. Even if the color does fade somewhat hopefully the fragrance will make up for it.

As a matter of fact, I ordered this rose from them, and maybe it is still alive somewhere in a pot (or not) but its arrival coincided with my car accident, and I could not take care of my roses in the last two years, so the potted roses were also left unattended, I am sorry to say.

I hope it will work out well for you and you will be hooked on roses as I got addicted to clematis:-)))

You've already posted that you'd already placed your order, but since I didn't get that far before thinking about your request and making some notes, I'll just list a few things here--where I can always locate the information when I need it ;). You never know, you might decide that you are going to really get into roses, and want some more names.

'The Fairy' that you liked the form of is available via its much more richly colored sport, 'Lovely Fairy'. Not fragrant, but that's likely to be a problem with most possibilities of the form you have already found attractive.

'Baby Faraux', another polyantha, has more purple in its bright color and looks pretty close to what you are looking for. Lots of places offer this one and lots of people find it useful in the landscaping. Rogue Valley Roses (in Oregon) has a cultivar of this one that is fairly fragrant. Not all clones are equally fragrant, so check carefully at the website you might order from for the degree of fragrance they say their particular offering has. (I found this out the hard way with respect to degree of thorniness. Just because a rose book says a particular variety has no/few thorns or because another nursery says the same thing doesn't make it true when ordering from a different nursery, no matter how good the nursery is generally.)

I haven't tried either one of these reddish roses, but have them on the backburner as a "maybe" sometime: 'Orléans Rose', or its shorter sport, 'Miss Edith Cavell'. Both are polyanthas and should be vigorous. You'd end up keeping Orléans Rose trimmed to meet your height requirements, but that's not such a bad thing with polyanthas (because of a tendency for the blooms to hang on even when they're past being pretty). Vintage Gardens has them both. Or if you order Miss Edith Cavell, a closer nursery carries that one: Appalachian Rose Nursery.

Lots of posts recently about people happy with their 'Thomas Affleck' roses. You might have to give it a haircut once in awhile but that might appeal to you too. Available at Antique Rose Emporium.

Their website isn't the greatest or most informative, but the nursery at www.rosesunlimitedownroot.com is located in South Carolina and an excellent source for lots of roses, most of which ought to grow well just a bit farther north where you are. They are wonderfully careful with shipping at that nursery, though it costs extra if you don't order at least 3 roses at the same time.

I had a problem with damage on the shipping for one of my orders from Chamblees, and they immediately offered to send a replacement. (Do call right away if there's a problem.) I couldn't make up my mind as to whether the rose might not recover or not, so I declined their offered replacement right away. Well, the plant was in dire straits after several months of trying to nurse it back to health (the broken single major cane left an opening I didn't realize at the time needed some Elmer's Glue, and sawflies had a field day with that broken cane). But Chamblees still replaced the rose for me when I called again after several months' time and even though it wasn't totally dead but looked near death for sure at that point. Anyway, Chamblees will be getting more business from here for sure! You'll likely be happy with whatever they send you too, Miguel.

Oh, I almost forgot... I went to Rogue Valley Roses and looked at the pictures of all their polyanthas and they do have some with orangish colors. I'll enclose the link to their polyanthas below so you can quickly scan the pictures on the two polyantha pages to see whether there are any you want to investigate.

Roses Unlimited also carries a lot of polyanthas:
http://www.rosesunlimitedownroot.com/new_page_25.htm

As does Vintage Gardens:
http://www.vintagegardens.com/roses.aspx?type=search&product_name=&product_fullclassname=Polyantha

The display at Antique Rose Emporium is a bit different, but if you scroll down this page until you get to the Polyanthas (under "Class"), the Polyanthas will all be together:
http://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/main.html?field=Family

Here it is for Chamblees:
http://www.chambleeroses.com/order.php?search_value=polyantha&Search=Search

Best of luck to you,
Mary

Thanks again everyone for all the wonderful help and advice!
:)