Albas bloom on old wood only.

You should try to figure out what caused the dieback. It wasn't the winter. Did it put on a lot of growth late in the season that didn't have a chance to harden off?

(I have noisettes with more live wood than that)

I guess I assumed that the die back was due to our unusually harsh winter, temps went below 0 and it was the first winter for this rose in my garden. The buds that are breaking out and the suckers look very healthy though.

An alba should be perfectly tip hardy to well below -20F. I've had roses survive -30F without any damage. While there were areas that did get cold this past winter, we don't live in one of them. If anything, the lows were a bit on the high side. Anything that couldn't handle this winters cold basically isn't a zone 5 plant, and would be killed off by a 'typical' winter.

It was warm enough that my teenaged daughter once again went all winter without having to wear her winter coat.

We do live high on a hill overlooking the river, so we get a lot of cold winds too. Even my explorer roses had some die back, which they usually don't. My Blush Hip came from Pickering, as I understand it, these are not own root roses. So, do I assume the suckers will be rosa multifloras, and I should pull them out? BTW, my teens never wanted to wear a coat either, must be a teenager thing.

Established roses will get winter kill because the canes are essentially dying of old age. How long an individual cane lives is variety dependent. I'm cutting dead canes from R. hugonis for the first time this year. It's almost 20 years old. Others only last for three or four years.

Properly planted (bud union buried), quality budded roses sucker very rarely. It is much more likely that the budded rose will go off on its own roots and send up a sucker than that the rootstock will sucker. I honestly don't know what Pickering uses for rootstock. They say they only use multiflora, but I've gotten a fair amount of some kind of canina from them. It's a pretty plant. I like it.

It's definitely a teenager thing. I have a rule that coats must be worn if the thermometer reads below zero at bus time. I know a lot of parents aren't as strict.

I'll have to take a look and see if I didn't plant the bud union deep enough, but I am fairly sure I did. I hope so. As for the coat thing, teenagers do outgrow that. Now that my kids are all 20 somethings, they all wear a coat in the cold. Maturity does kick in I guess!