And you know it's bad when you have a special set of pruners (old ones) to use on RRD roses.

Heartbreaking. It's here in Florida also.

I am so sorry!

I need to go tie by RdO up better today as she has that three year leap mode going strong. How horrible.

Oh my gosh, what a shame. It's such a beautiful rose. Why doesn't it ever attack the wimpy, ugly rose you meant to get rid of anyway? I am so sorry, buford.

Ingrid

I took some pictures because we always want to know, is it RRD. I was sure about this one. Here is a good picture of two RRD affected canes and in the middle a healthy one:

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You can see that the healthy one is smooth, straight, the buds are not distorted, the leaves are not curled, there is a normal amount of growth. The RRD canes have too much growth, distorted buds, curled leaves and the canes were very soft and weighed down by the amount of growth. These canes were so soft, I could pull them right off the main cane. There isn't that much of a color difference, which is why I probably didn't notice it sooner.

Here is another picture:

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A tell-tale sign is too many new canes or laterals coming from one cane. Here there are three coming from the same bud eye. Not normal.

So sorry! Hopefully you caught it in time. It is in the Knockouts a few blocks NE of me. I'm paranoid. Will you remove the entire bush?
Susan

And the recepticals at the base of the blooms are missing. That's a minor point, I know, faced with so much raging ugliness, but somehow the sexual parts of a flower get messed up and (I wonder) if the kind of distortions there can be used to measure how long the rose has been sick.

That yours produced petals (maybe too many sepals on one) and was still really flexible when it bloomed.....

Early on, I would pass around gummy bear worms to mimic how flexible the sick roses canes would be when we'd expect hardened canes.

FWIW, my sick Lamarque had a very similar look several years ago and it, too, really came on fast.

Ann, I did see a strange looking branch on it last fall, but then we had a early hard frost, so I didn't really think about it. It seemed normal this spring, this is a late second flush new growth.

However in cutting the rose down (Yes, I got rid of it, I'm not going to risk keeping this in my yard), I did see that many of the main canes had dark brown pith. And the rose hadn't looked that great lately. It had yellow leaves and was showing black spot, which it has never done before. I wonder, in addition to the RRD, it suffered more winter damage than it showed and that made the RRD worse or vice versa. Anyway, it's now chopped up in plastic bags in my trash. I still have to dig out the root ball, but not today.

Is there a chance that the pith was excessively wide on the sick canes?

I think that the Black Spot may be tied to this year's weather. Remember the horrible after Easter Freeze of several years ago. Things were growing at the wrong time of year after that and almost all of my roses had Powdery Mildew (never before then, never since). The BS might be tied to excessive pushing growth after this spring came late and the BS suppressing temperatures came later as well.

I haven't yet had RRD on my 'true' noisettes, the ones with less Tea (lovely Tea leaves) apparent in them.

No, the width seemed normal. These were large woody canes some over one inch in diameter. And many were showing the brown pith.

I have heard comments that the tallest rose may get the mites first.Buford, I am so sorry that this happened to your award winning rose. When I had climbers, I had a Rev d Or, and they are beautiful -- just as your picture is beautiful.

One of our GW members used to spray with Wilt Pruf. She felt that the twice a month spraying would help repel the mites. I used to put Wilt Pruf in my spray, but once I stopped spraying, I also stopped using the Wilt Pruf.

Sammy

Kaye, in Arkansas, was the wilt proof user. She gardens on the top of a mountain and there is RRD all around her. For the mites to drop from air currents, it takes both turbulence and then a part of the air mass that is a lower velocity.

For a number of years, Kaye didn't have a RRD problem. She finally did have it on one rose, but only on that one.

Jean in Nashville also tried it and had some success. Then her disease pressure went to H..... because an untended field upwind of her neighborhood was full of multiflora that got sick and the owner refused to do anything.