Where do you garden?

Fortuniana is famous for "going to find its own water." If the next door neighbor has a lawn or something else with sprinklers, it likely has built its main root ball right next to that with just a connector root from your plant to there. Whatever plant in your garden that you DO water is likely to be where Ms. Fortuniana has set up shop. That's why it is problematic to try to move an established rose that is grafted to Fortuniana -- one never knows where the main root ball will be, and its likely not directly under the plant.

I don't know of any other rose varieties that do that.

Kathy

I ended up taking out my MAC. I know this is a little trivial, but I needed to be able to continue to get into the house. Tamable it was not.

I garden in Northern CA, Sonoma County. We had a couple of 20 degree freezes this winter, but this was severe weather for us. MAC has a 2nd story balcony to climb up, so there's some room to grow. I'm just hoping I won't have to groom weekly!

Kathy, that's very intresting info about Fortuniana. I've been thinking it's probaby usurping water from other plants, tho the nearly plants aren't very deep-rooted. What kind of radius is at work? I also wonder how deep the roots are, and if it can tap into the water table. It's about 10 years old, so it's pretty well established.

Hoov - you couldn't climb in a window?

Living here in the land of the giants, I don't think planting them and trying to keep them trained is a great idea. There is one rose Felicite et Perpetue that was planted in the wrong place in error(mislabled) I keep it down to shrub size and it still blooms, but really it's just a hassle.

Rosecats, I have no idea what the maximum a Fortuniana plant could travel to find water. Probably the older the plant, the more range it could have. But I've heard of plants that have gone 10-15 feet under a patio slab.

But I do not think it could go down to find the water table (unless yours is VERY shallow -- less than a few feet down). Fortuniana has fairly shallow roots that need air (like any roots), which is one of the reasons it is sensitive to cold and unable to be grown in areas with deep winter freezes.

I also garden in No Cal. I have 3 MACs growing on our garage and up trees (these get no summer water at all), and a Sombreuil and a banksie lutea and a climbing Cecile Bruner growing 3 stories up our house. I agree that trying to keep them "in control" is too much of a hassle, at least for me in this climate. I think I was lucky when I planted them that where they are, they can grow to their hearts content. I am probably just very lazy, but we don't prune the MACs at all (except for the time one fell off the garage roof and into the neighbors back yard, taking up 1/2 of their back yard until we got over there and pruned it and winched the rest of it back up to the roof). The others get pruned maybe once a year, but only to keep them on the house & tie up the long canes that are trying to make it back down to the ground.

I was very glad to hear about Fortuniana - our back yard neighbors had one (actually, they had a row of them along the fence, I am guessing rootstock from a vanished line of hybrid teas ) and it had sent about half of its canes over to our side of the fence, and was growing up our large eugenie tree. Then suddenly one summer the whole thing died - it was quite a chore getting the dead canes out of the tree. As it was dying I took cuttings and one survived. However, although I planted it 3 years ago it is still quite small - I was glad to hear that eventually it will persevere no matter what I do to it - we have it planted at the bottom of the same eugenie tree, and of course it is in shade from the tree most of the time, but I have hopes of it growing 25 feet up the tree as its parent did.

My advice is to let the big monsters be big monsters and enjoy them!

Jackie

Jackie, my Fortuniana needed around 3 years to assert itself; it didn't flower until the 3 year mark, and growth really took off after that point. But, after 3 years...let's just say I'm very glad my next-door neighbors like roses!

Gail, now that your MAC is gone from over your front door I'm so glad I copied a picture from the forum of your front yard with MAC the gorgeous main feature. I'm just going to pretend it's still there. I wonder though, did you ever put anything there to replace it?

Ingrid

Sombreuil is still there. I had Sombreuil AND MAC out there, and MAC was winning. Sombreuil has been much easier to care for. This is Sombreuil:

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This was MAC after a very hard pruning:

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You can see a bit of 'Sombreuil' over the doorway (RHS) but the rest was MAC. About 3 months after a hard pruning. I wasn't able to get through that gate it had grown out so far, and it had engulfed the balcony--couldn't open the doors. So I wacked it back to stubs and three months later it looked like that, so I decided for safety reasons it had to come out. It was not an easy decision but it was the right one.

i prune MAC several times a year! My friend has Pauls Himalayan Blush - now that is a rose which will cover a church in two weeks. Constant vigilance called for!

While it may be possible to tame MAC and other giant roses -- in fact I know someone who does this successfully -- it is probably more work than most rose growers would want to do. Even keeping these roses to a medium size calls for several heavy prunings a year.

I have some rambling thoughts about this. I wonder what that does to the soil and the long term health of the plant with this kind of radical pruning over and over again. You would be removing 90% of the plant mass repeatedly. Unless you chip all that material and put it right back under the plant, or have a good place to compost it, you are pulling nutrients out at quite a rate that would be hard to replace. Personally I don't compost rose prunings in my home compost because of the thorns. I don't do a hot compost and can't be sure of decomposing all the sharp stuff, not to mention any possible disease build up.

Gail, I'm thrilled you still have a climber there, and I had no idea you had two. I can see that keeping both of them within bounds would have been a daunting chore, and for what it's worth I do think Sombreuil's flowers are more beautiful. Off the subject, could you please tell me the name of the lovely pink rose next to the gate? And can it be the same rose as in the lower picture which looks more apricot? Your companion plantings are so beautiful. Your property must be a showstopper from the street.

Ingrid