Sad news.....Bill Grant just called me from his hospital room where he has been for two weeks now...while hanging his humming bird feeder he fell on his deck and fractured the left side of his hip, which has been pinned. I met Bill years ago at one of Mike Shoup's Fall Rose Festivals, hosted him in Denver when he gave his Species Roses talk at the Denver Botanic Gardens and took him to Fairmount Cemetery, and in 2002 I believe he and Miriam Wilkins flew me out there to give a talk at UC Davis about the Fairmount Roses plus he took me to San Juan Batista and the Old Roses Celebration and Miriam's lovely jungle of roses. He authorized me to share this news and his room phone number, which I will here and later at ChezVibert once my Outlook Hotmail stops acting up. I thought Bill was 84...he is 88! His number there is: 831-428 2374

I bought this 'Chromatella' rose from Ashdown Roses easily 8 years ago, but it has never bloomed. So today I did a version of the Victorian technique called "pegging" by using strips of panty hose to tie long canes back to itself. IF this works it will trigger a geotropic response that will cause blooming laterals to form.

http://www.helpmefind.com/gardening/l.php?l=2.1174&tab=1

I discovered "Fairmount Proserpine" in October 1999 when a student who'd taken one of my Old Roses classes at The Denver Botanic Gardens walked with me all over the vast cemetery looking for fall color as the vast majority of the Old Roses and Mystery Roses there are once bloomers that peak June into July. My own root plant here in Tampa is 4 years old in a buried 5 gallon Water Wise Container Garden, organically grown...it hangs on year after year vs. being VERY vigorous in Colorado gardens. Here the petal count is much lower, the bloom form flat vs. buxom, with blooms much smaller, the color much more pink. The night I found it I curled up with The Old Rose Advisor and felt that 'Proserpine' is a likely ID. Fred Boutin has a plant and he was inclined to agree. Here it is quite dwarf, but in Denver it made a vase-shaped shrub about 6 feet tall. Attached are pics of two blooms from this morning...use the link below to see Michael Mowry's pics of the original plant at Fairmount Cemetery.

http://johnstarnesloveofroses.blogspot.com/2010/08/fairmount-proserpine.html

Wow....what heartbreaking pics...it looks like the powers that be at Fairmount Cemetery, despite all the lip service about "caring" about the Old Roses and Mystery roses, have removed EVERY rose from their Riverside Cemetery where I spent years studying the roses there discovered by now-deceased Denver rosarian Toni Tichy....the pics at the link break my heart. I am so glad that Toni cannot see this.

http://fairmountheritagefoundation.org/riverside-cemetery-revival/#comment-382

Girija Viraraghavan, guess who has approx. 40 seeds from a giant hip of Rosa gigantea growing in India? Thank you!!

Want fast, agonizing and copious blood loss? Try training the Cherokee Rose (Rosa laevigata) to stay OUT of your garden path and to go UP rebar. Even more fun while sweating in the heat!!! Prickles of death! I'd kill but want to try for a couple more years to breed with it.

http://www.helpmefind.com/rose/l.php?l=2.5335.12