I've done some in the fall they did fine for zone 7 could'nt speak for any other zone.

In the UK everyone plants bare-root roses in the late autumn. But then we have mild winters. (Our climate is roughly comparable to the Pacific North West, I guess.) So it will depend on the hardiness of the roses you choose. Presumably you want to plant as deeply as you dare (say 3 inches below the bud union) and - if the roses are not totally hardy - give them a good mulch?

Based on my experince and I am also from MD, it all depenends on the rose type. Species, rugosas and old European OGRs are very happy when planted in fall here. These roses are smart enough not to start growing during warm spells in winter. They need more the just warm weather to start growing, probably the the light hours play a role.
In contrast most of the modern roses, HPs, as well as southern roses like Chinas, Teas and Noisettes start growing as soon as you have few warm days. Then the new growth get killed by cold weather, canes get canker and the rose dies or get very slow start and will be falling behind the roses planted next spring.
Olga

I agree completely with Olga. The danger is not cold but intermittent warmth. I had a very bad experience with the modern roses in a fall-planted order from Pickering-- around half of them dead or crippled after growing out repeatedly during winter. Perhaps being pruned down makes them more anxious to grow out than established roses are.

We've done it here in Southern California.
Of course our winters are mild -- Fall planting gives the roses a couple of extra months to grow roots before they start pushing a lot of growth. The only problem we ever had was obtaining bare roots in, say, November.
But that's coastal Southern California -- and everyone knows that we're "different" out here. :-)

Jeri

I'm sorry to hear that they might not do well when fall planted here. I'm supposed to get roses from Palatine this fall as one of the roses I ordered wasn't ready to be shipped this spring. I might have to tell them to hold off and ship it next year instead.

I want to plant a Felicite Parmentier bareroot in the fall. All other roses have done fine but wouldn't want to loose this one. There is enough warm soil weather for roots to establish. Advice?

Carla

Carla, as Olga said, once bloomers should be fine because they stay dormant.

I'm a bit warmer and fall planting is better here because Winter is our rainy season, and the roots get well established. I mound with a light mulch to keep the canes dormant as possible.
The problem with spring planting is that the temperature swings still happen and leafing out stil gets hurt, and summer slow-down-the-roses temperatures come on really fast. This year the heat came two weeks after the Easter Freeze and growth throughout the garden is not what it has been in previous years.

My mother would have advised anyone regards fall planting. She always told anyone that fall planting in the south was best, but if you planted in October you would have to water more as October is (that was then and this is now) the driest month we have. Keep them watered in October, and the rains will start in November and they will harden off in the winter so that they can be strong for the hot days of summer.

Therefore, she did her bare-root roses in the fall and she had few of them. Roses were difficult to find and the Progressive Farmer was her source of information. Imagine that. My grandfather was good at predicting rain having come from a long line of planters, and no sprinkler systems back then, just put the corn shucks, pea hulls, manures and pine straws around the plants and hope for the best, and it was glorious. I grew up in a gardener's paradise. It was not grown on expensive boutique fertilizers and/or nutrients, just what was left from the day's work, but it was lovely, acres of tidy grass with azaleas, daylilies, pine trees, roses, camellias and bridal wreath, where nearby neighbors from nearby towns, took the 30-minute-to-1-hour drive on a Sunday afternoon just to appreciate the beauty of hundreds of azaleas, camellias, rows of daylilies, iris all blooming against an Irish spring lawn.

It seems to be Eastern zone 6 and 7 where the trouble has been reported over the years. There should be no problem with roses breaking dormancy in Wisconsin where their mounds will freeze over shortly after planting and stay that way. Here we can have a few consecutive days in the 60s any calendar week of the year, and then again I've experienced -16 F.

I don't know Michael. We've had some odd weather in Wisconsin in the fall. Last year it was freezing on Halloween, then warmed up by Thanksgiving and stayed unseasonably warm past xmas. I'm worried that if I plant them early in the fall that we'll get a warm spell and they'll leaf out, or if I get them late the ground will be frozen and I won't be able to plant them. It's hard to predict. If I hear from someone in Wisconsin or the upper Midwest who has done it and had it work then I'll try it but I hate to risk it on a rose that I really want (I'm getting Countess Sonja from them which was too small to ship this spring). Maybe I'm being too cautious but I can't see much of an advantage beyond making sure I get the rose this year.

Athena, yeah, I guess I'd be cautious with a HT. You might lose the canes that would help it start if planted in spring. I wonder if any Upper Midwesterners here have done it? At one time, fall planting was normal, because the producers didn't have the cold storage facilities. About the timing question, I've read that people in the North would dig the holes early, cover the soil pile with something to keep it unfrozen in case winter came early, and plant pretty well into the fall.

It is so interesting to hear about different experiences from all of you in different regions. We are only a few blocks from the water and we can have long warm spell then really cold temp. We also have lots of strong wind occasionally. So it is the wide temperature swing on the east coast that is so risky to us because Ann is further in land can do with no problem? Yes, Jeri California is "different" hehe a rose paradise in my eyes.
I read on Regan Nursery website they suggest to plant in the fall but after a hard frost maybe so the bare roots stay asleep? But maybe this recommendation is not true every where. Moreover I am smitten with Miss PatÂs Ballerina then with OlgaÂs Lyda. Is Ballerina OGR and safe for fall planting Olga, providing that we stay put here then I can give it a try this fall.

I changed my order date to spring. I think it will be safer, and then I'll be able to add more roses to my order without worry.

Spring planting carries its own risks, I would have thought. There is the danger that a bare-root plant will make vegetative growth very quickly, before it has sufficient roots to cope. Unless you are assiduous about watering (in conditions that would not obviously call for it), the plant may well die. The advantage of autumn planting is that the soil remains warm for longer than the air, especially if you have clay, and the daylight hours are quite short, so you get good root growth with very little vegetative growth.

Andrew, we plant (or should plant) in very early spring, daffodil time, so the rose doesn't sprout for a month and comes out about the time it is safe from frost. People sometimes plant them late, usually discounted roses, and these plants often struggle or fail altogether.

Ballerina would be considered a hybrid musk, "collector" rose and gets lumped because of its class with OGRs, which actually it is not, but nonetheless, it's an old rose. I would not lump all OGRs as safe to plant in fall if you are in a cold zone, as the noisettes, bourbons, etc, (all of which are OGRs) would not perform the same as the gallicas, damasks, albas, etc. I hope that makes sense. So if not, look for those particular classes as okay for planting in fall, damask, alba and gallica. Olga has some gorgeous OGRs. Alas, the same class will not bloom for me in the lower southeast.

An advantage to fall planting that no one has mentioned is the freshness of the plants. Bareroots are dug in October and stored in cold storage after that. So plants purchased and planted in the fall have been in cold storage the shortest time. For that reason alone, any time I intend to buy a bareroot, I buy it as early in the bareroot season as possible. By the end of the season, those roses have been rattling around and drying up for 6 months or longer.

I would almost never plant any bare-root rose in Minnesota in the fall, but I could easily see myself burying it on its side for the winter. You can quite literally get any rose to survive even the cruelest winter unscathed by doing that, to the point of pulling up roses in the spring that never even turned or shed a leaf. Amazing. What else are you going to need your zucchini patch for after the frost destroys the vines, anyway? :)

If you plant in very early spring, daffodil time, then the soil will still be very cold, and I can't imagine that the roots will want to make much in the way of growth. What concerns me is that the soil warms up much more slowly than the air, especially if it is clay soil, so vegetative growth will always be greater than root growth in the spring. I admit I know nothing about your conditions, but I would have thought it logical either (1) to plant bare-root roses in the autumn if possible (depending on variety and local climatic conditions), or (2) to plant potted roses in the spring. Which is, I suspect, what people tend to do?

Spring is the time when the majority of bare-root roses are sold and planted here - at least, that is the case in the north where fall planting of roses is virtually unheard of because of the extremely cold winters. There is certainly no great problem with this practice as far as I can tell, although it is a fact that potted roses make faster growth because of their warmer (and often better oxygenated) roots. When roses are sold in pots instead of bare-root in local northern nurseries, the price is usually one or more orders of magnitude higher, too, a fact which is probably not lost on consumers.

I agree with Andrew's comments on the benefits of fall planting, & I scurry during that season to get, shrubs (including flowering ones), trees etc in the ground. My track record with the fall planting of bareroot roses, however, is a pathetic one.

It seems to me that when growers dig, defoliate & prune their annual crop of roses each fall, they are not harvesting dormant roses. They rely on refrigeration to force the plants into dormancy & keep them in that state. After several years, I concluded that the bareroots I received in the fall weren't really dormant, but rather in a severe state of shock -- a state from which they set about attempting to recover the moment I planted them. The results invariably were rapid top growth that got zapped before it had a chance to harden off. If the plants survived, they struggled over several seasons before fully recovering.

If I could rely on consistently mild winters in my zone, I would prefer to plant all my roses in the fall. I now request delivery of bareroots in February if possible. I have, however, had great success with early fall planting of ownroot roses.

Hi Windeaux,

I was about to cry until I read your last sentence! I am going to pot up five bareroot roses (they are all own root) tomorrow. Due to drought conditions, I thought it was best to do that and then try to plant them in the ground in early fall and heavily mulch them. It's good to hear that you have had success with that. Is there anything in particular that you did that may be helpful for me to know? Thanks!

Wndreaux, interesting observation, about the dormancy of fresh bareroots. You're right - it isn't much. Theoretically, they are stored at 35-40 degrees in climate controlled warehouses. If the temps are in the 50's, I'd expect even dormant bareroots to make an attempt to leaf out. I see them stored in unconditioned sheds at reteail nurseries, which is why they are either sold or potted up by mid- to late January, when days start lengthening in Calif. I know they start growing here the minute the go in the ground, regardless of low temperatures. It's the high temps during the day that seem to signal wakeup.

I'm not talking about very hardy roses that know how stay dormant and apparently have a different set of triggers. One year it would be cool to organize a soil temperature-hours of daylight-air temperature-GPS brigade across the USA and Canada to plot out what makes hardy roses leaf out and bloom. Rugosas are a good example. They may be first to bloom some places but are among the last to bloom for me.

Bareroots planted at daffodil time do not develop an excess of top growth over root growth. They are easy to manage, automatic really, and I've always watered only once a week when they leaf out, just as I do established roses in the spring. In contrast, roses from pots (normally planted at dogwood time or later) will run out of water after a couple of sunny days.

I think Windeaux has it right on. I also agree with the own root planting success in the fall. From what I infer in this thread, it really comes down to the severity of temperature fluctuation during winter in a certain region that makes or breaks the bare roots, esp. the parts at or above the bud union. For mild climate like CA or elsewhere in Europe, BerndoodleÂs fresh bare root preference is very valid for fall planting. Very interesting discussion.

Reneek, if it is possible, you may want to set up drip irrigation. I have moderate drought here and the irrigation has been a real blessing. Brown grass and lush green roses.

Reneek -- I'm not sure I have a good understanding of your situation. The only bareroot ownroots I've any experience with are J&P's 'New Generation' roses, which I treat exactly the same as grafted bareroots (including ordering/planting them at the same time).

The ownroots I fall-plant arrive leafed-out, & often in bud. I always assume that they are greenhouse grown, or at least grown under conditions that are more controlled than what I can provide. Consequently, I place orders that will arrive by early Oct, at the latest, so they will have at least 6 wks (one hopes) of benign weather during which to adjust to their new environment.

When they arrive, I examine root development. If the root system is skimpy, I never actually plant them -- instead, I sink the pots in a protected spot & wait 'til spring to plant in their permanent location. Regardless of how I plant them, I spread a good, thick covering of mulch (but not mounded over the stems).

The only other thing I do with new ownroots is to defoliate them by hand after we have had a hard frost or two. I don't know if that is actually beneficial, but it seems to be. Hope this attempted answer to your question is helpful . . .

Windeaux,
You may have to forgive me....I am an absolute newbie and I don't know what the heck I am doing when it comes to something like roses. I'm trying to learn as much as I can and I may be confusing myself! Won't be the first OR last time I do that either.

The roses that I soaked in water today are from J&P and they are David Austins....don't know if they are own root or not. The ones that ARE ownroot (according to their website) are from Ashdown and they have not shipped yet.

The J&P roses some are beginning to leaf out, there are no buds and I am soaking them for 24 hours. Tomorrow, I will place them in a pot for a few months and store them in shade as I was directed in another thread because my soil is rock hard georgia clay. We haven't gotten rain in well over a month now. I want to plant them in the ground in October/November since that is when we get the bulk of our rainfall. OR if some miracle happens, I will plant them sooner if we get a lot (meaning a week's worth) of rain.

Now that I suspect that these are not ownroot, is there anything that I should do differently as a result? Would I still be ok in putting them in pots and keep my fingers crossed for rainfall that will allow me to put them in the ground asap?

Here is a link that might be useful: J&P roses

On grafted roses, the graft is a lump where the canes diverge. There is a shank below the graft and then another lump where the roots diverge.

"Store them in the shade"-- I think you should expose them to sunlight as soon as they are growing out. If the growth buds you see don't abort, that would be soon. But since they have no feeder roots yet, maybe just dappled shade to start. The concern with summer planting is mainly to get them out of dormancy at all, then not to fry the new growth with insufficient water uptake.

The difference between ownroot and grafted bareroots is not much. The graft needs to be protected against freezing, but that's unlikely to happen to Austins in zone 7b.

You need to think about soil preparation, unless you've already done that. It's best to work clay when it's semi-dry; wet is the wrong time, because it's hard to avoid compacting the clay into bricks. You could break up the dry soil with a pick or mattock and see if it crumbles some when you bang it with a shovel (doesn't have to be all fine stuff). If so, you can loosen the soil 12" deep over the planting area and mix in plenty of finished compost or dried manure. In most cases, Piedmont soils can also use some Dolomite lime. Or you may need to wait until it rains and thren dries out to the point of crumbling, not mashing.

Thank you, Michael. I checked all of the roses, they do not have bumps or grafts on them. I do have some older rose bushes with grafts, so I understand what you are saying. The ones that are soaking is smooth from the root to the canes.

Ok, I will move them to sunlight as soon as I see new growth. Currently, they are in dappled shade....I was thinking of moving them to full shade...I won't now. I'm planning to water after I pot them everyday.

I have been clearing the areas where I plan to put them. Some will need round up applied first...we're going to do this later in the week. I have a honda tiller that I was planning to use to deal with the soil once it became a little more pliable. I do agree with your assessment regarding clay compaction.

I have a friend who offered horse manure...so I will use it definitely. I appreciate all of your help. Thanks again.

It has indeed been strange to read this thread! I live in Denmark and 99,9 % of all roses are grafted plants (on Multiflora-rootstock). No one sells own root roses here in Scandinavia. In all books about rosegrowing published in this country during the last 70 years the recommendation is clear:

The bare-root roses are not harvested until they are dormant. (Mid-october). The dormant bare root roses are kept in very cold storage houses (about 40 degrees F). The general rule is to plant bare-root roses in the fall. In my experience (I have planted about 3000 bare root roses) 95 percent of all roses survives and starts growing in the spring. Planting bare root roses in the spring is not as good. It takes longer time for the rose to start growing and it has to be watered fairly regularly, so the soil is moist all the time. Alloow it to dry out and the rose will die! Spring planted bare-root roses have survival rates of about 70 percent. And they are more fragile the next winter since they are not as established and the canes does not harden as well as roses planted last fall.

Bare root roses planted in the fall (or anytime during the winter where it possible to plant the roses will get established more quickly (grow roots) and bloom well even the first season.

If we want to plant bare root roses in the spring/early summer we buy potted bare root in good growth.

This is how we do it over here in a colder climate.

reneek,

I was suggesting dappled shade to start, not full sun. Wait a couple of weeks and gradually increase exposure as the roots develop.

Cupshaped, your experience in Denmark is probably similar to the milder regions of the United States where fall planting of roses is already reasonably well-established. It's certainly nothing like the cold we receive in the northern U.S.! Think more like mid- to upper Finland when you want an analog for Minnesota winters. I doubt very much that they experience this kind of survival rate when fall planting bare-root roses there, and there certainly is no opportunity to plant roses during the winter - the ground (and the gardener) is frozen solid! In fact, many years the snow is on the ground and it is freezing already by mid-October.

You might want to consider adjusting your zone rating, by the way. I checked the USDA zone map of Europe, and even the coldest part of central Denmark is a tiny dot of zone 6 - presumably that would be 6b since it's surrounded by zone 7.

I have thought carefully about which zone USDA zone best compared to my area. Especially during the last 2 very mild winters! But most winters we reach temps of -10F. And every 3-4 years we have some periods were temps are between -15F and -25F. True most of the time the winter temps are between 30F and 15F and some very mild periods of weeks of temps between 35F and 55F. So I do not understand how they came up with the USDA maps to compare the climate here? It says the USDA zones are just guidelines. And I tell you the weeks we have temps below -10 F or the winters where the temps drop below -20F the Roses do not like it. And roses don´t care about avarage temps ...they are not annuals. A rosebush can grow fine 2 years with mild winters and really freeze back during the harsh winters. So I have to choose roses that will survive zone 5a winters and winterprotect the fragile chinas and teas I grow. I tell you even a few days of temps below -10F and the roses are goners...then it does matter that a mild period comes for some weeks before it gets cold again. So average does mot mean much .... Also I have seen the size of floribunda and Hybrid Teas in North Utah (zone5/6) and they had canes the thickness of a wrist and 4-5 feet tall. I have never seen roses grow that tall. Chicago where I have been several times ... has sweltering heat with temps between 85 and even 100F for weeks in Juli and august. My friends in Cold Iowa zone 5a have everything blooming 3-4 weeks before things bloom here (daffodils and lilics E.I) and quite hot temps months before it gets summer here. So it really is hard to compare. All I know is that one has to choose roses that can survive the temps they have in the area they live in. I have to anticipate temps below -20F. So that makes it 5a. Also the amount of sunlight must matter so the lattitude must be taken into consideration I live on 56 degrees N lattitude. While Chicago (zone 5) is on 41 degrees N (same as Rome in southern Europe) I guarantee you that the sun intensity that far south is much bigger than this far north and that it plays a big role in growing roses too... I just saw a zone 5 guy´s Evelyn roses in the Antique rose gallery ... it is nearly impossible to grow that Austin rose so big here. It freezes back to the ground every year here. That should not be the case if I really lived in zone 6b. So other factors must be taken into consideration than the temperature. Perhaps the higher summer temps and the greater sun intensity makes the roses grow bigger since the amount of sunlight also determines how tall a rose grows? But yes I am happy I do not live in Montana ...even though is one of the most beautiful places on this earth (and good troutfishing too!!).

The USDA zones are supposed to relect an average of the annual minimum temperatures over a period of years. So if most winters have one morning below -10F, it is USDA zone 5. I don't know why there should be so much difference between what's on the map Stefan looked at and what's on Cup's thermometer.

I think it is the hot summers that make roses like the Austins grow bigger in much of the US. Rose flowers don't like heat much, but most rose plants do.

Yes, I'll definitely agree that you are zone 5 if your temps go below -10 degrees Fahrenheit - the zone maps seem very out of touch with what you're describing. But when do you manage to plant your roses in the fall if they aren't harvested until the middle of October? I still can't figure that out. We even have to get our hardiest container stock planted in Minnesota before then, much less tender roses that only survive if we heap soil and mulch over their canes even after they're old, established plants. How long does your winter last - and when does your soil thaw out in the spring?

Summer heat is probably an even greater difference; it gets hot in the U.S. My home in Minnesota has already seen more than 8 days this unusually hot June reach 90 degrees or above. There is such severity to the temperature swings from season to season and from day to day in the Americas.

Maybe Cup is not converting C to F correctly, or lives in an anomalous place. Aalborg should be one of the colder places (northern interior), and it has a record low of -13 F, which suggests the average annual minimum would be zone 6 at worst. Copenhagen is zone 7 with a record low of zero. Winter lows average 30F, which is a few degrees warmer than here.

There's another significant difference between the USA and Europe: latitude. My part of Northern California is on a latitutde with Sicily. I'm right in the middle of the country. Denmark is comparable in latitude to Ketchican Alaska.

Stefan, I don't think you can compare Minnesota (unless you want to use Siberia.) Scandanavia is famously influenced by the Gulf Stream, known locally as the Norwegian Currrent. Our USDA zones don't really translate. Maybe the low temperatures are accurate, but imagine the differences when you take into account the number of hours of daylight.

You're right about daylight, Cass - for instance, in the winter in Minnesota the stronger sunlight combined with the extreme cold results in massive sunburn to tender plants' stems and leaves. We have major trouble growing most broadleaf evergreens there. I've always admired the Scandinavians for having long, dark days when the temperatures are their worst!

The oceanic influence on Scandinavia is simultaneously remarkable (zone 9 in part of coastal western Norway!) and yet limited - the cold in much of Finland limits their rose selections to varieties we need not even resort to in Minnesota. I'd generally consider that Siberia has almost too much variation to compare; some parts of its (habitable, even!) permafrost reach -90 degrees Fahrenheit with summer lasting at most a month, which is extreme even by the toughest North American standards.