Since the early 90s I've grown in landscape clients' gardens and now my own a great many rose varieties that a Florida rosarian has been telling me and others ever since then that simply can't grow here, with ego-based dogma replacing the spirit of inquiry and trial and error that can make being a rosarian so much fun. I stopped attending his meetings 15 years ago as there was no dialogue, just his "Moses on the Mount" pronouncements, even when members would show up with entire bouquets of what he said can't grow here, or his insistence to me and others that there is no such thing as the iconic "Pink Cracker Rose" even though he mistook a 90 foot hedge of on the campus as 'Old Blush'! Stunning contrast to brilliant yet humble rosarians I know/knew like Miriam Wilkins, Fred Boutin, William Grant, Ralph Moore, Barbara Oliva, Anita Clevenger, Pam Greenewald and others who are insatiably curious and eager to learn.

Roses have their own wisdom, and I love it when they don't know when "experts" announce that they "can't grow" in such-and-such a place, like the full collection of own root, organically grown Teas, Chinas, Noisettes and Poly-Teas I had in my Zone 5 Denver yard, or the Hybrid Perpetuals and Bourbons I love in my Tampa yard that "can't grow here at all, or that MUST be budded to Fortuniana root stock and drenched with obscene amounts of water and pesticides". I am getting VERY spoiled by daily FRAGRANT blooms on my 'La Reine', a Hybrid Perpetual from the year 1842. It has never set hips for me but I use the pollen to do crosses. Lovely form, color and perfume!

http://www.helpmefind.com/rose/l.php?l=2.3676&tab=1

Yesterday's crosses: (Seagull X Don Juan), (Seagull X "Pink Cracker Rose") and ("Barfield White Climber" X La Reine).

'Seagull' has JUST begun blooming so I can begin doing this year's pollenations on it.

I just boinked a bud of my red 'Don Juan' with pollen from Jill Perry's incredible species climber Rosa gigantea...fingers crossed it gets pregnant! It is easy for me to imagine some of the seedlings proving to be repeat blooming climbers, likely pink though red would be wonderful!