I have RU and I've seen Laguna. I don't know about zone 5 hardiness, but you should pay attention to that when people comment. Both are good roses. You might decide on the basis of color. RU is sometimes a strong coral or salmon, while Laguna is a more traditional deep pink. RU is generally considered resistant to BS, but it does spot some in my garden. People report good resistance for Laguna. Laguna seems to be the more rampant grower. If you want a fan of long canes on a large trellis, Laguna will do that. RU is a vigorous grower too, but it tends to step along with 6'-7' lateral shoots. It repeats well for me and is very thorny.

Rosarium Uetersen is very floriferous, but I have to admit the colour surprised me a bit before I got used to it, even Barbie fades in to the background when it is in bloom. Laguna is the more fragrat of them, but both have noticeable fragrance. Both are good roses, nice growth habit on both.

In contrast, here's Rosarium Uetersen this year. None of my roses were anything like as impressive this year as last year (and the photo above was from last year), but one of the few that had a very nice spring showing was RU. It's got stiff heavy canes, so it's a bit hard to train over the low fence where I have it, but it tends to put on a very nice June bloom and some scattered flowers here and there the rest of the year. This year is the first in its 5-6 years where there has been a good second bloom a few weeks ago, not quite as heavy as this but a nice flush. You can see that the blooms fade from bright coral to a light coral pink pretty quickly. As Michael says, it depends on what colors you like and whether you like this changeability in roses. I do, but I have to watch to deadhead out the blooms once they start turning brown like the one at center or this rose can look a bit ratty. Still, I find the dark coral has more of an impact than even the dark pink of Felix Leclerc behind it, maybe because there aren't nearly as many roses in that color scheme.

Either way, you can't lose with one of these great roses.

Cynthia

Big fan of RU & its exuberant personality. The very distinct blooms resemble oversized carnations or zinnias, open coral pink with lighter reverse & fade to salmon pink in this climate, showing a variety of tints within the same colorway. Healthy no spray & generous with bloom, it's a happy rose for me. Grew it in another garden years ago, missed it since & brought in two to grace this garden - ownroot from Chamblees.

Met Laguna in person & wasn't as taken with it as I'd expected. Those examples were raspberry pink with definite lavender undertones, which wouldn't harmonize well with many of the saturated pastels I prefer. Realize color varies with locale, soil, weather & more, just didn't make my heart beat faster.

Rosarium's blooms are larger than Lagunas by an inch or more, and RU is rated to 4b while Laguna's rating is 5b.

My Laguna has won my heart,because it covers itself in blooms during the spring flush, and has continued to bloom even without dead-heading (we have gotten plenty of rain this summer, however). It's also extremely vigorous, which is a quality I like a lot in a rose-mine is getting huge, way out-growing it's "designated spot",but considering my big landscape,not good soil, and the lurking fear of drought,far be it from me to criticize!..,and it's foliage is perfect, too! If the colour was only more reliably "cool" in tone ( often it swings a bit too close to red), I'd consider it perfect! because I'm beginning to see that the cool colour range is my favourite:deep, purply-pinks, lavenders and mauves of all shades,cool medium and light pinks, lilaccerise,,those deep, deep purples and purply reds...This is what makes me shy away from RU: that coral/salmon colour just doesn't do it for me. Too bad, since Kordes roses are beginning to rank high on my list...
Too bad that it's so hard to find Kordes'Karlsruhe. I had it years agobut lost it to an ill-timed moving job...now THAT,I seem to remember, has a perfecr deep pink colour, without the hints of red. I've got to find a new one of them....bart

As Cynthia's post suggests, RU needs to be quite mature before it repeats really well, but at age 5 it started giving me three good flushes.

Really, you can't go wrong with either choice unless you don't like the color. Look at lots of photos on HelpMeFind.

They are both very good roses which are hardy in zone 5, but not reliably cane hardy in zone 5 in the sense that they will come through a winter with minimal dieback. Sometimes yes, but it really depends on the severity of the winter and location of planting.

Listed below is where I would give the edge to each rose.

Cane Hardiness: RU
Vigour: Laguna
Disease Resistance: Both excellent, Laguna has been immune to BS here.

Bloom Profusion: RU on first flush, Laguna on later flushes
Repeat Blooming: Laguna
Fragrance: Laguna
Bloom Size: RU
Bloom Form: RU as it holds it's blooms more upright. The blooms on Laguna have weaker necks and they can tend to nod.

Thanks everyone for your input. It sounds like they are both very good roses. Now the question is.....can I squeeze them both in somewhere? I am so running out of room!

Heather

RU needs at least 10", Laguna probably 15'.

MordenMan - I love your features and the comparisons between these roses on such a variety of aspects. I agree on all of these, especially the contrasts in bloom profusion and repeat blooming, with RU having an impressive first flush and Laguna doing the steadier blooms.

I do disagree about the one point you made on hardiness, at least in my region, since both of these roses are cane hardy for me. Laguna had enough cane left to stay threaded through the 6' fence it's on in the first picture, and I preferred to cut RU down to about 4' this year as it's really in too small of a space this year. Even after last year's polar vortex, they really were among the few cane hardy roses of any sort for me, including most of my shrub roses. Of course, that may be specific to my dry zone, since you have considerably more moisture in your region that may affect hardiness differently. Still, I find they both always come back from winter with minimal dieback even in severe winters, so it's not necessarily a count against them in considering them as climbers for zone 5. Regardless, they're reliably good roses without being the monster climber that Quadra is, and they should work fine for Heather if she can manage the room!

Cynthia

Cynthia,

I fully agree, both roses have above average cane hardiness. However, they haven't been reliably so for me in my climate and particular planting locations. In a few winters, they have been nearly tip hardy and in others have needed considerable pruning. This past winter for instance, both Laguna and RU needed to be pruned down to about 2 feet.

I guess a good generalization is that you could probably expect about 40-60% of the cane to be viable in an average zone 5 winter for these roses depending on climate and planting locations (microclimates).

But yes, both of these are excellent choices and I like how you have them planted along that fenceline as well. Beautiful photo.

This post was edited by the_morden_man on Thu, Aug 14, 14 at 10:28

I should add that my claims about space requirements would assume no winter damage.

Cool, Mordenman - your percentage of cane survival represents the range of hardiness of these climbers well enough to account for the variable climates where it grows, and I think it'll be helpful to newbies and others who are considering this rose. For me, if I can get at least that 40-60% of cane survival over the winter, the rose will both reliably bloom and expand nicely over a support in the summer. When I've had to prune even monster hardy climbers like Mme. Alfred Carriere or Madame Isaac Periere to the ground like last winter, I've gotten the growth back to normal levels by now but no blooms.

Thanks for the complement on the photo! I like having a mix of climbers on any given fence spot when possible, because of the variable extent to which any given climber is going to have substantial surviving cane enough to bloom, or decide to sulk for a summer. One way or another, I want SOMETHING to bloom each year.

One other comment to add to Michael's timely note about space requirements and climate is that climbers tend to need less "floor space" but more "elbow room" than other kinds of roses. In other words, to respond to Heather's questions about fitting them both in a given space, it depends on how much room they have to spread out on a fence. In the top photo, I have probably 10 or more climbers stretched out along 12' or so of the fence that you can see, so the bases of the climbers are pretty close to each other (some are on the other side of the fence, as the neighbors let me play on their side too). That only works because the branches of all the climbers can stretch horizontally along a large area of tall fence and overlap each other freely. You want climbers to grow horizontally as much as possible so that the blooming laterals can sprout up from the canes.

If you had a 6' section of fence, you could probably put climbers at both ends of the fence and stretch them toward each other and start zigzagging the canes up as they grow. If you only had 3' of fence horizontally, even if you had plenty of ground room to work with, that would likely only support one climber at best, and it would have to have very flexible canes to wind back and forth along most of that fence to get a full bloom. In that kind of space, Laguna would work better.

Hopefully that helps as you plan your climbers! As you can tell, I'm always in favor of cramming in more roses and other plants as much as possible, so take my advice with that caution in mind (smile).

Cynthia