Where are you and how far are you willing to drive?

lovbrugs - learn how to take rose cuttings and ask friends and neighbors if you can take a little off of their roses. It doesn't hurt the rose, and most people are happy to help you out. It may take a little longer to grow a rose from a cutting, but what a pleasure!

You can also ask them for their seed hips. I think the patent on the rose needs to be at least 20 years old before you can propogate it. OGRs, or antique roses, are perfect for taking cuttings. Good luck!

thanks so much for your answers, I am in Tx, and i HAVE tried with cuttings, but not much luck there. I probably do something wrong.

Where in TX are you located?
There are some very good rose nurseries in TX.

Jeri

Have you look on craigslist or freecycle.org?

The Lowes where I live has out of patent HTs for $10 and Knockout roses for $25. Some of these older Hybrid Teas might actually be good roses for your climate--which doesn't have the disease pressure some of us have.

Chamblee's in Tyler has a sale area and you can pick up very nice roses for $5.00, and sometimes even less.

I also positively end definitely recommend Chamblee's as I did in another thread.

$25 is a lot to pay for a rose in Lowes, and it is way too much to pay for Knockout anywhere that is hardly qualify to be a rose at all, IMHO.

To grow KO in Texas would not make sense at all - there one can groww teas, Chinas, Noisettes, Bucks and can get them at Chamblees under $10 or as Catrose says if someone can drop by for $5. The quality will be better than any rose at Lowes.

Please, please, please avoid buying ANY plants at Lowe's, Home Depot or any of the other "mass" distributors (in which I would include Walmart), because last season New England was devastated by a blight (the infamous 'potato blight') that was introduced on some vegetable seedlings distributed through this channel. They simply cannot maintain scrupulous quality control AND rock-bottom prices, and the fact is that they must offer rock-bottom prices. I wouldn't recommend eating there, and I'm asking you not to buy plants there!

If you are close...GO TO CHAMBLEES! Their sale bin is a treasure trove of bargains!! Their roses are $8.95, mostly, for one gallons and they grow like crazy. This is the best value anywhere, and well worth the drive, plus the greenhouses are full of blooming plants! I go nuts every time I go there....Chamblees is your answer!

I agree with alameda that Chamblees would be a great place to shop for your roses, and all the better if you are able to drive there. Their *regular* price on most roses is $8.95, so if they also have a sale bin, those would be even cheaper. I'm not sure I'd go with a sale bin rose, though, if it doesn't happen to be one of the varieties you've decided in advance that you want to use for getting started with roses. Those ought to be the very easiest varieties, I'd think, and you ought to have already figured out what size and form would look nice where you want to plant a rose of whatever colors you'd like.

To decide what you want, try going to Chamblees website at

http://www.chambleeroses.com/order/Earthkind-Roses/

and spending a bunch of time looking at pictures and their information on some of theirs that are the easiest to grow. I'd start with the Earthkind roses that Chamblees sells; those would be good bets for a newbie. Chamblees' Double Knockout is a nice (smaller) red rose that's also very easy to grow, and I'd personally want to add Gruss An Aachen to that list of easy to grow roses that they sell. Gruss An Aachen is fragrant, though not quite as fragrant as the very fragrant Earthkind rose Belinda's Dream that is a dream of a rose that's really good for cutting that they also sell. Chamblees also sells Cinco De Mayo which has been bulletproof here, though a bit on the thorny side.

Add to Chamblees' information, all the other information that you can find at

http://www.helpmefind.com

and make up your mind as to colors, sizes, plant forms, etc. that you want for whatever spots in your yard you have in mind.

Another good source of information is the Antique Rose Emporium. If, for example, you decided that you needed a shade tolerant rose for a particular spot, you can look down a whole list of possibilities there, and then go to Help Me Find for more comments, and do a search on the variety here at Garden Web for even more comments.

Going by results so far in our yard, I'd want to add General Schablikine to that list of no-worry, no-spray roses; it's a smaller tea (NOT a hybrid tea!) variety that Antique Rose Emporium sells. If you are looking for good landscape larger roses, you might pay special attention to the teas that Antique Rose Emporium sells. One, Mrs. Dudley Cross, is also sold by Chamblees, and everything I've read about it is good. We just got our first one last September, but so far it has been bulletproof and also almost evergreen. We've gotten more of that variety this spring too. It will become a fairly large rose, larger than General Schablikine. General Schablikine is definitely evergreen here in zone 7 and a beautiful rose in every way.

If Chamblees happens to be out of what you decide you want, you might consider ordering from or driving to the Antique Rose Emporium.

http://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/

Their roses are more expensive than Chamblees, but really cheap if you take into account their large size (2 gallon pots). If you can't drive to either nursery, neither one overcharges for delivery and the roses from both places arrive in good condition. Both places sell top quality healthy ownroot roses and are good places to do business with generally.

If as time goes on you wish that you'd bought more roses in the spring and are still looking for *cheap*, then visit Roses Unlimited in August, around the second week.

http://www.rosesunlimitedownroot.com/

I bought a rose for $3.00 there last August that I knew I wanted and it was perfectly healthy, even though quite too large for the pot. The only thing is, you'll be charged for shipping and handling there as if you'd bought three roses, and with a surcharge for an order under three roses, so the $3.00 will end up not being quite so cheap as it looks; figure on ordering at least three roses from Roses Unlimited to make it overall a good deal on price--and have backup varieties in mind, since they sell out very, very quickly at their August reduced prices.

Chamblees and Antique Rose Emporium have another delivery period in the fall and of course you can still buy plants there then too. Better hurry if thinking of ordering for spring delivery; I don't think they'll be shipping much longer for this season.

Best wishes,
Mary

Here is a link that might be useful: Earthkind roses information