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| Everywhere I researched about roses the recommendation was to choose disease resistant roses. And, because there are varying strains of blackspot, also to find out which roses are resistant in your own area. Unfortunately, no one around me grows roses (that I have been able to find) without spraying, so I currently have no access to that particular but crucial bit of information. I chose 17 out of 18 roses listed as very disease resistant from hmf roses, and even as 1st year bands in pots with potting soil and plenty of water and nutrients I have had far too much defoliation on almost all of my roses. Wouldn't it be great if we could start a list in our own gardens of no spray roses and the degree of defoliation to bs, etc. year by year? Prof. Rousch at Garden Musings blog has done this. I am sure it is very helpful to gardeners in his area. Can we keep a listing of everybodies' rose varieties and the degree of disease problems experienced organized by location??? Pretty please? Roses are too expensive for me to test trial them repeatedly, and I do not think that I am in a minority with that restriction. Also helpful would be the year(s) you have had the rose in your garden. I have heard that some roses have superior disease resistance in their first year because of chemicals used at the nurseries carrying over-- and also read that as roses mature, their ability to resist disease sometimes improves. So here I am offering my new roses in NE Iowa to start the listing. Sweet Fragrance Bailey rose year 1 10% or less defoliation from BS Thanks! |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| Don't give up on your new bands, iowagirl. MANY will mature into much healthier specimen than they appear as "infants". There are a variety of factors involved, some of which are cultural, others genetic, but most roses won't demonstrate their true selves until they have a decent root system under them. Kim |
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| I think the suggestion of creating lists of roses that have done exceptionally well or badly in our gardens is a good one. I should set the example by adding my own list, but that will have to wait for me to take a current inventory. Good idea! |
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| Also, 10% is not bad. In areas with heavy blackspot pressure, not very many roses will be completely clean with no spraying. Perhaps a few will do so. Rosefolly |
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| If you go to the bottom of this page where the Search function is located and type in "disease resistant," you will get a listing of many threads on this forum in which posters have listed their disease-resistant roses. That might help you locate some good ones. In my zone 6 KS gardens, the following are my healthiest roses--rarely or never needing spraying. Pretty Jessica (Austin) I have some others that need some periodic assistance, but definitely are not disease-magnets. Kate |
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- Posted by Nippstress 5-Nebraska (My Page) on Thu, Sep 5, 13 at 20:46
| Another idea for a central place to keep track of disease resistance of various roses, beyond Kate's idea of looking back at past threads on the topic, is to post that information on Help Me Find roses. That is a volunteer-run resource that we all rely on fervently to help us choose and plan care for our roses, and I think it would be incredibly valuable for you to post your % of BS under the "comments" section for roses you list, IowaGirl. Make sure to list your location with the comments, because what won't get BS in Iowa might spot horribly in Virginia. For me, I tend to have very good resistance to disease among the "shrubs" from various breeders, and by far the best are the easy care Easy Elegance shrub line. I can't estimate the % BS coverage of my roses since I tend to have a high tolerance for it and only notice it when it gets really bad, and maybe not even then if the blooms are nice. Cynthia |
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| I wish there was some way there could be better regional information on HMF that focuses on disease resistance. Right now it seems hunt and peck. You have to research a specific rose then hope there is information on it from someone in your area and often times you don't know the location of the commenter! How awesome it would be to look up "Tennessee" or even "Southeast" and see disease resistant lists provided by different gardeners (who would be encouraged to narrow down their location a little) than to have to look up dozens of individual roses! It would also be good to know which roses have been in your garden that were NOT resistant. Question: If you were going to divide up the US into regions that would be useful for determining disease resistance how would you do it? |
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| It's all tricky though, isn't it. It is so subjective. I think 10% is just doable....but 50-60% would be extremely annoying - so much so that I would avoid it, probably compounding the problem even further. And it also depends when disease strikes. If a rose looks good during flowering, I am not bothered too much if it looks grim when it isn't.....and mostly BS and mildew tend to come later in the season here in East Anglia. It also depends on context - I have a pair of absolutely useless Mutabilis....they are naked right now.....but, back in April, it has the freshest, most vivid growth. As it is a tall, spindly thing, I grow one at the allotment, with graceful perennials and grasses, as though it was a herbaceous perennial itself....and it looks fine (it reblooms while defoliated and mildewy but no-one notices. The one I have in my garden is rubbish and there is no disguising its gawky nudity. So, it is never as simple as listing what does well in your area - it has to be more specific than that, taking into account your garden, your soil, your cultural routine and your aesthetic preference (I have a really high tolerance of weeds and barely any tolerance of blackspot). So, ultimately, there is no escaping having to experiment....and I am rapidly coming to think I would rather have multiples of half a dozen really great varieties than spend a lot of time and money, waiting on a slow to mature, expensive shrub which may end up irritating me for months on end.......... |
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| Thanks, Kim, for the encouraging word. I am quite a pessimist and need a reason to overcome it. I will add the info to hmf. I found the members comments very helpful in my searching for the most dr roses. Thanks for all the other thoughts to consider, plus for other DR rose listings. Thanks also to STrawberryhill who shares all her info about her healthy roses. I am not scientifically minded and have difficulty deciding which methods are most likely for me to try, but I did mulch my roses in pots with pine bark which has caused BS problems for her. I will avoid that on next year's band purchases. I wish some foundation did real, controlled experiments on all the gardening wisdom about roses so that we could know what to do in the face of so many and often conflicting recommendations. Seems like only people wanting us to buy their products fund any research! |
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- Posted by roseblush1 8a/Sunset 7 (My Page) on Thu, Sep 12, 13 at 12:04
| A few words about HMF and how you can use it to search for disease resistance. As many of you know, I've worked on the database for many years. Before I started working on HMF, the early volunteers did not always add the REFERENCES where they got their information. Nor, were there all of the features on the site that are there today, so volunteers are slowly going back to fill in the blanks. AND there were already tens of thousands of roses entered into the database before I started working on the database. Where disease resistance is reported for a rose, the information generally came from a published REFERENCE open to public scrutiny or the plant patent. When a member adds a COMMENT to the rose page, we sometimes ... depending on how many people are working on the database at that time, will bring that information forward to the main rose page and put a note in the NOTES section ending with "See MEMBER COMMENTS". That's telling you the the disease resistance came from a site user's experience with the rose. If you want to get a sense of rose grown regionally, there are two ways, both of which only work if site users enter their gardens on HMF. When you open a rose page, you can click on the GARDENS tab and if you see a lot of gardens growing that rose in your region, it is an indicator, yes it's subjective, that this rose is a good rose for your area. You can also tick the GARDENS tab and select to view them by a specific state if you want to view listings of roses grown in the gardens in your state. Yes, it's still kind of vague, but it does narrow down your search. Also, you can post a question on the Q & A forum and many site users will respond with their experience. The best way to do this is to go to the rose page for the rose you are researching and click the MEMBER COMMENTS tab and then the POST A COMMENT button. Another way to look is to do a SEARCH of the Q & A. The most recent posts will appear first and is kind of cumbersome, but it's a lot better than when I first started working on HMF. If you are a premium-member, you can do an ADVANCED SEARCH on more than one criteria. Yeah ... I think just this one benefit is worth the $2 per month, but that's up to you. You can select CLASS and then drop down to GROWING and select for disease resistance. It's a database. There are lots of different ways to find information. There is no staff to answer questions, so you have to do the research. The information always comes from public REFERENCES or site members. The webmaster is open to new suggestions for how to do things, but many people haven't already experimented with the tools that are already available. Even if that is true, the webmaster is very open to suggestions to improve site users' experience on HMF, but remember he has a very long list of suggestions, so you may not get an immediate response. It's a tool and you can make it better with your participation. Supporting a site that you use regularly, whether or not you use the premium-member benefits, is just the right thing to do, but no one is checking. The support for HMF has increased ... and thank you .... but, to date, it still does not cover the cost of keeping HMF available to you. Smiles, |
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- Posted by mad_gallica Z5 Eastern NY (My Page) on Thu, Sep 12, 13 at 12:28
| Over the years I have found very, very few reference lists of disease resistant roses that were any use at all. The problems are primarily two things - no information on where the lists come from, and no information on what care the roses received. Even here, it can take multiple posts to pry out of people the fact that their disease free roses are sprayed every two weeks. Without the opportunity to interact with the people supplying the information, it is often almost useless. |
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| You're welcome, Iowagirl. Many decades ago, the USDA and ARS partnered to fund the kind of research you wrote of. Dr. Walter Van Fleet, among others, actually did rose and other plant breeding for the USDA in efforts to overcome the hardiness and black spot issues. As with most government funding, that eventually went away. The Canadian government also funded ornamental research which resulted in the Morden series of roses and some others. That program has also been disbanded and the rose collection destroyed. If you have the chance to read many of the ARS annuals from the fifties through early eighties, you can find many research reports, yeilding a lot of information which might help. That's where I read the information that the average florist variety requires thirty-five perfect leaves to generate one perfect flower. Of course, not every rose has the same requirement, but it gives you the link you need to understand the releationship between leaves and flowers and helps you to see what you need to enable to get what you want from a plant. In the absence of independent research funds, only the manufacturers are left to pay for any research. It isn't surprising their "study" results seem to always support their products. To add one more wrinkle to Lyn's great suggestions, many who have their gardens listed on HMF allow private messages. I've contacted a number through private messages (and received a number myself) concerning rose health and performance. Give it a try. I've not met anyone that way yet who wasn't gracious about the contact. Kim |
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| While it is true that a rose may become healthier with maturity, it's also possible that blackspot may get worse. This is because the disease is not very mobile, and it may take a couple of years for a new rose to get exposed to all the strains of blackspot in a particular garden. Then when the wrong strain comes along, a rose may go from seeming very resistant to very susceptible. Iowagirl, I suggest you plant more Buck roses such as 'Earth Song', 'Prairie Harvest', 'Winter Sunset', 'Country Dancer', and more of the recent Kordes roses. |
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