I want to give you a heads-up -- mine had a lot of dieback this Winter. I had to prune it down to about 4" this Spring -- it was 2' tall last Autumn (my poor "Secret Garden Musk Climber" had to be cut even shorter, but there's still some green down there). Admittedly, this was one humdinger of a Winter, and my 'R. moschata' came as a band only last year, but the plant just didn't seem to want to go to sleep and thus got slammed hard by the cold. And I'm in 7a -- we hit 1F as the lowest temperature this Winter. While we didn't go below the "zone minimum", we didn't have our usual "hovering around freezing most of the time, with occasional frigid days in February" Winter. This year, we had WEEKS where the daytime temps stayed below freezing. That's just FREAKY for here.

So if you're going to grow this rose in 5b, put it in the most protected spot you can find. Plant the bud-union a few inches below the ground. And probably plan on putting up some kind of wind protection, or even wrapping the rose, for Winter.

That being said, when I was reading as much as I could find about growing this rose, one thing I came upon a few times was its shade tolerance. Where I put mine, it gets just morning sun, then "bright shade" (i.e. reflected light but not direct sun) from about noon until 4pm, then shade. If it climbs more than 5' tall, it will get some afternoon sun. I was hoping to grow it as a short climber, anyway, so if less sun makes mine do that, so much the better.

:-)

~Christopher

Thanx I ordered it before I knew better. Just wanna give the poor thing a chance. If I plant it under the Mongolia tree on the south side of my house it will have a brick wall on 3 sides. The Mongolia is really old so it's always losing branches. So more sun over time. IT will get a lot of afternoon sun and dappled morning sun.

Mine gets only morning sun and is huge. Mine is own root and had the blessing of mild winters the first few years. This year, we, too, had a hard winter. I lost the outer edges, but the major canes survived and new growth is happening.

You could also give it some winter protection--wind screen, mulch, etc. I had one in quite a bit of shade at my old place. Reflected light. Direct sun for maybe 30 minutes. As others noted, it grows taller in shade. Carol