Can you help me confirm?

There is a chance that if you cut that cane off as low as possible you can save the plant. Before someone comes on and poo poos that idea, you should know that I have saved roses in fall by doing that and that includes the David Austen rose 'Charles Austen' which has servived ten years of growing after the removal of the cane which had the same sort of out at the end growth as yours.

No guarantees, but it's worth a try.

Thanks, Ann, I will definitely try to cut back canes, it's sure worth a try!

Worth saving just because it's such a horrible example.

By the end of the first week of June, there were at least twelve rose bushes with RRD there. I talked to the garden mgr and then the store mgr and got them tossed in the trash truck.

Then the state checked out the greenhouse that had grown those roses from bareroots to near bloom in pots. They found no RRD in the greenhouses, nor was there any in fields anywhere close to those greehouses.

Based on that, five weeks to really ugly growth in modern roses.

Some lab studies have taken as much as six months for the disease to show symptoms after inoculation/bud graft transmission.

But, IMO, in optimum growth conditions, that one month is pretty firm. Now if a rose is going into slowed growth in fall, often nothing will show until the following spring on HTs (what I've seen in my garden), but I think this is a function of internal physiology of the different classes of roses.

When you proclaim that something isn't a contageous and lethal disease, you need to be really careful that you know your subject and that your answer does no harm.

I've done some searches in plant literature that have left me feeling as if I'm the only person who ever wondered about thorns. The interest is in growing roses without thorns/prickles genetically, not in the why.

Pat,, it's not a stupid question. It's just we haven't watched the disease enough to know.

So sorry.

Steven