I have a friend who says. "Do you know what kind of rose I like the best? The pretty one" I think there's alot of people who fall into that catagory. At least they have some interest. They can leave the rest of it to us hard core folks. If they're not particularly interested in being educated it doesn't matter what the presentation.

i often think it is more useful to simply think of them as flowering shrubs. The value of this is that we do away with the annoying issue of remontancy which seems such a dealbreaker for many people. Why? They buy their rhodies, phiadelphus, exochorda, hibiscus....all of which only have one flowering flush and feel quite satisified, yet feel ripped off with a once flowering rose. Never mind that we often get hips as a bonus. Also, the idea of a shrub, as opposed to a roseBUSH overcomes the nasty lollipop HT's with 3 blooms and naked legs - a shrub is lush, abundant and full. So, yeah, the whole idea of caregories, unless fully understood, is just more irritating waffle which makes people feel faintly embarassed and confused. I myself am often very unclear about why such and such a rose should qualify for this or that class and especially confused by the distinctions between roses which are already referred to as shrub roses, against ground-cover, floribunda, english etc.etc.

I think it is probably simply marketing. Perhaps it is good to describe them as heirloom roses or heritage roses or even antique roses, implying that there is history and a wonderful sense of something glorious attached to them. Just calling them old might make them sound, well, old as in worn out and used up and ready to be replaced by something newer and improved.

Rosefolly

I think many people envision a rose as a long stem with a high centered (HT style) bud on the end...similar to what they may have gotten in a dozen roses from a florist for Valentine's Day. The majority of my OGRs do not even look like a "real" rose to them. Personally, I think my OGRs look like real roses, and the modern HT (especially those in the garish colors) do not look like real roses.

I'm not sure that it's all about the marketing...some is about the product and the change in taste/fashion.

Let's also consider the amount of money and effort that is used to promote David Austins vs. OGRs.

Robert

A couple of days ago my daughter asked me whether the shrub with red foliage that she was looking at was a rose. She was puzzling over 'Canary Bird', which makes a great big (thorny) plant and colors beautifully in the fall, and as plants go has no resemblance to speak of to a Hybrid Tea.

Suzy has a point. I myself could never bring up any enthusiasm for Rugosas until I stopped thinking of them as roses and just saw them as shrubs: then they became appropriate and beautiful. (I still don't grow them, because they don't like my garden conditions, but that's a different story.) Gallicas are particularly shrub-like, with their canes that come straight up out of the ground and their bristly, nubbly, glandular growth; their deciduous foliage that colors in fall and their hips, though of course roses of all classes set hips. We've been conditioned to think of roses as having certain characteristics that are in fact the characteristics of just a few classes, the Hybrid Teas, ground cover roses, Floribundas, English roses (smooth canes, sparse, large, sharp thorns, large glossy foliage, one point of growth where the plant emerges from the ground, a tendency to be evergreen, repeat bloom).

In case I haven't made it clear yet, my subject is how we mentally categorize roses. For most people, a rose is a Hybrid Tea style plant. Also in most cases, I think that roses that most closely resemble Hybrid Teas are those that attract gardeners, or at least, roses that they can recognize are roses--English roses are a good example: different, but still visibly roses according to the HT guidelines.

With so many old roses being so very different from the HT model, vendors have to either persuade their customers that these too are roses, or leave behind the whole question of what a rose is and persuade them that these plants are valuable flowering shrubs, on a par with viburnums, peonies, barberries, and all the other garden stalwarts.

The classification of Old Garden Rose is, for gardening purposes, worse than useless, because these roses have nothing in common beyond the date of origin of the classes they belong to. They include repeat blooming roses and once flowering ones; big shrubs and small ones; roses with glossy foliage and smooth slender canes, and roses with rough canes and foliage; healthy thrifty roses and finicky disease prone gluttons. But giving them all the name of OGRs greatly tempts the gardener to believe that they have some point(s) of similarity as garden plants.

Melissa