Jess: Beautiful roses. Thanks for opening this thread and showing these beauties to us. The temperatures in South Africa don't seem to be rose friendly at the moment and when it is over 40*C, I think they need a bit of protection. In any case, we shouldn't be expecting the best from them in temperatures over 40. Perhaps they go more into survival mode and less of performance mode.

Thanks again. Would love to see more photos as and when they are available.

regards

These were my first bloomers in spring

Teddybear - a miniature, her blooms turn a dirty pinkish color now with this terrible heat.

Sally Holmes. This rose is now starting to climb over the roof of my studio - she was planted 2 years ago.

Frohsinn'82 Very strong but scorches when the temps reach 40 C (she started blooming a bit later than the others)

Lovely Pat Austin, happier now that she's been replanted in shade but still dislikes the terrible heat.

Sharifa Asma. Heavenly fragrance and to my surprise she doesn't mind the heat at all. She shot up after I added logs around her roots to protect her against the heat. The broom sticks are to keep her from swaying in the gusty winds we sometimes experience here. The thorns are to keep naughty cats away.

Vanilla. this is one strong rose. She was also a first bloomer in spring and hasn't stopped blooming and expanding since.

One of my all time favorites with such a beautiful perfume fragrance - Belle Epoque. She started blooming in spring and is still going strong non stop. Unfortunately her old-gold colored blooms turn faded pink in this heat.

Oklahoma - now much more magenta than when she started blooming in spring, lovely fragrance, huge blooms. Scorches in this terrible heat.

This is what she looked like in spring

Jess: We have winters here in Pakistan and this time, I have yet not pruned my roses because most of them are still performing and blooming. Have pruned only those bushes that gave indications of hibernation.

May like to see my roses in January 2016 by clicking the following link

My Roses in Zone 9a - 2016

regards

Some of my favorite quotes, I hope you find them inspiring.

please feel free to post yours.

“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.” —Eckhart Tolle

“You are free to believe what you choose and what you do attests to what you believe.” —A Course in Miracles

“It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.” —Krishnamurti

“Love all God’s creations, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in All.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” —Meister Eckhart

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” —Meister Eckhardt

Jess: I love the close-up pics of your roses, esp. Wedding Garland ... like buttercream frosting. The quotes are so true !! and the pic. of quote by Rumi represent nature at its finest. I'll going to share that beautiful pic & Rumi's quote with my daughter ... it gives me joy. THANK YOU for starting this thread ... I like to come back and see it again, again, since we don't have your unique roses in America.

My thoughts about life and health: Love is a choice, rather than a feeling. It's a better choice to love myself more than a piece of fat & sweet pastry, even if I feel like eating it !!

One of my kid's friend is an accomplished sprinter-runner, with a wonderful Mom (a lawyer) .. I heard this Mom told her kid, "Bye, honey, remember to make GOOD choices !!" The sum of good choices is a good person.

I like to read true stories about criminals. Most of them made bad choices through going with their feelings .. and feelings can be so wrong !!One of the true stories involved an executive in Alaska. When business was good, this rich man hired a nanny to look after his children. He had an affair with the pretty & young nanny. She moved away to be an airline stewardess, but he kept the affair with her, despite her being married to someone else. He divorced his wife and married the nanny. Then his business went down, and he had to borrow money from his ex-wife. He took some steroids to keep his sex-drive going, but the side-effect made him violent.. At the end he shot the young nanny and went to jail.

Another true story involved a retired couple who went shopping for a vacation home. The wife met a recently widowed guy who's selling his vacation home. She fell in love with him, left her life-long husband, got married to this guy who stayed in his house with her, instead of selling. Within a year, this guy died of a heart attack, leaving her alone. Her ex-husband refused to get back with her. So the woman went along with her wrong feelings, and created the most heart-broken situation, both for her, and for her ex-husband.

LOVE IS A CHOICE, AND NOT A FEELING. Loving myself enough to make good choices for myself: fruits & veggies & exercises.

Thanks Khalid, for sharing my garden and roses, and sharing yours - I wish mine would still bloom in winter like yours!

And thanks Straw also, for sharing and enjoying my roses and thoughts. Yes, I agree with you...it's all about choices....

A young lad came over the other day to help me clean a path past my small dam below, and when he saw some aphids I told him not to worry, the ladybugs enjoy them, they won't be there by tomorrow, and then he pointed out to some holes in a rose leaf...and told me to beware, the ladybugs will eat the leaves as well. I explained to him that the holes are the work of a tiny little worm, which is also not a problem because the birds take care of that.

It made me realize once again how many times we make assumptions (and ignorant choices) about ...just about everything, and end up bringing out the poison (and the guns) and kill everything in our path....

I found a few quotes by Richard Bach:

“Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever found any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?”
― Richard Bach, One

(This book called ONE is all about choices..I love all his books).

http://www.inner-growth.info/private/books/one_quotes.htm

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/16904.Richard_Bach

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1984746-one

Thank you, Jess, I really like that quote by Richard Bach. I'll post some quotes from Richard Bach's links that Jess gave:

" Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it."

"We design our lives through the power of our choices. "

“If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.”

“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.”

“A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.”

Some other quotes on choices:

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“Choose your love. Love your choice.”
― Thomas S. Monson

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing." Theodore Roosevelt.

“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“I fell in love with him. But I don't just stay with him by default as if there's no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.”
― Veronica Roth, Allegiant

I just received this word of advice from our expert rose grower in Pretoria - Ludwig - where I buy my roses, about Oklahoma scorching in the hot sun:

"It is standing proud with us at 40C and is the best. If it scorches, it does not get enough water."

He also says Firefighter will be the best option for fragrance and not scorching in high temperatures, but that it'll grow much higher than shoulder height over here.

thanks Straw for those wonderful quotes about choices....I also enjoyed all the Harry Potter books! :-) what an amazing writer she is!

and from now on, much more water for my poor roses....I never knew how I made them suffer till now...feels terrible to even think how they must have suffered....

Jess: My firefighter is own-root, so it's shorter than grafted. The growth is very fast, and I like its new growth: leaves are reddish. If one cut the blooms as 0.5 meter long stems for the vase, it branches out more.

I posted in my other thread of 1/3/15, how some people can achieve professionally but never mature emotionally or spiritually. In America General Petraeus and ex-CIA-commander resigned from his high post, due to an affair with his much younger biographer, Paula Broadwell. Paula is married to a handsome medical doctor, yet she fell in love with power and had an affair with the top guy in military. The affair cost Petraeus his job, plus being indicted. Going with one's foolish feelings, rather than making a right choice, cost countless broken marriages and careers.

Making a right choice comes from personal committments, religious beliefs, or consciously choosing to do right. Going with one's feelings is dependent on fickle variables: alcohol, medications' side-effects, hormones, ego, insecurity, greed, or thrist for power.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/petraeus-sex-scandal-cia-chief-tells-friend-screwed/story?id=17835234

Problem is this drought...even with mulch and logs, I just can't get enough water to my roses...do you have any advice Straw? How does one know when they have enough or not enough water?

yes Straw...hormones play a big role in this world... much too big... too little emphasis on self discipline I think... and also self respect and respect for others...

thanks for that link will definitely read it...

Jess: When there's a drought, I would prune shorter than normal, so the roots have less upper growth to support. That's to prevent diseases and pests in advance. I would STOP ALL FERTILIZER, to enable roses to go dormant. When roses are dormant, all the food & water is saved for the roots.

The worst thing that Cantigny park did one year of drought and high heat up to 100 F, or 38 C was they didn't prune their roses. Roses were so tall & mostly leaves, and very few blooms. Jude the Obscure was 7 feet tall or 2.1 meter, only one bloom !! Other roses are so big & ugly that I could not recognize them.

Keeping the roots moist is the most important thing during the drought. That's why trees lose leaves in our late fall: to provide a blanket to protect the roots for dry & cold weather.

Our country is plagued with ego, greed, and lawlessness esp. in the home-front. 2 presidential elections ago: there's the handsome John Edwards who had an affair with his aide and lost hid bid for Presidency. There's Hillary Clinton with Bill Clinton (had an affair with an aide). But in 2013, after John Edwards' wife died of cancer, he broke up with his mistress Hunter, despite having a love child.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2518087/Rielle-Hunter-depressed-John-Edwards-new-girlfriend-broke-hire-her.html

Love AS a feeling doesn't last long, esp. when it's not honest to others. Love AS a choice lasts longer, because it's based on commitment to do what's right & good for oneself and others.

Loving oneself is a choice too: such as committment to daily exercise & healthy fruits & veggies & being in touch with God's love. Sometimes I subcumb to the feeling for a sweet or salty treat, and pay dearly for it later: acidic & fatty burp-up & lousy feelings later.

Sometimes I subcumb to the feeling of letting someone bother me, then get hurt .. when I should had made a better choice of being in touch ONLY with those who care for me: God my Creator, family & friends.

thanks for this great advice Straw... should I prune them as soon as possible? like winter pruning almost? any advice for my newly planted babies? I'm giving as much water as I can but this heat just is too over powering...the soil is dry deep deep down....everywhere...and yes, I don't give any gypsum/potassium whatever anymore now...

And, yes this is the best advice ever....:

when I should had made a better choice of being in touch ONLY with those who care for me: God my Creator, family & friends.

I would like to add - we shouldn't even THINK about bad influences/nasty people...just thinking about that hurts deep inside...and it lingers such a long time... versus, when I think about you and everyone else in this forum, I'm happy...

please spread the word as far and wide as possible - for prayers for this terrible worst drought ever in SA? I'm afraid I haven't got a network of people myself....

I read the story about Rielle Hunter...she is so pretty, nothing wrong with her at all...what is wrong with this man (John Edwards)??????????????????? Is it just the thrill of a 'new catch' that drives him from woman to woman?

Jess: I would prune the tallest tips that don't bloom, but I would keep the plant as short "umbrella-shape" to shade the roots below.

During the hottest summer, deer came to my garden to eat all the leaves of my Firefighter. It looked so bare that I gave it chicken-manure to promote leaf-growth, and that burnt my rose in the heat of summer.

Prune upper branches to make the plants shorter, but leave the lower branches alone to shade the roots. It takes tons of water to pump it WAY-UP to such tall branches .. but it takes less water toward the horizontal branches. If possible, train the branches horizontally, so sap & water can flow to the tip easier for better blooming.

Well said, Jess, on controlling our thoughts as the key to happiness. Think of goodness: God who loves us, our guardian angels, friends & family ... and we will be happy. I'm praying for rain for South Africa.

"when I should had made a better choice of being in touch ONLY with those who care for me: God my Creator, family & friends."

Thanks Jess. Best thing I heard in many day. Will carry it for the day. Getting late from office and in a hurry

thanks so much Straw

I found this article about roses and drought:

http://paulzimmermanroses.com/care/summer-care/should-you-water-your-roses-during-a-drought/

The roses in my personal garden haven’t been watered in over a decade. And that includes during a drought.

but then I read this in our rose breeder's newsletter:

http://www.ludwigsroses.co.za/newsletter/

The way trees drink

Scientists who study forests say they’ve discovered something disturbing about the way prolonged drought affects trees.

It has to do with the way trees drink. They don’t do it the way we do — they suck water up from the ground all the way to their leaves, through a bundle of channels in a part of the trunk called the xylem. The bundles are like blood vessels. When drought dries out the soil, a tree has to suck harder. And that can actually be dangerous, because sucking harder increases the risk of drawing air bubbles into the tree’s plumbing.

Plant scientist Brendan Choat explains: “As drought stress increases, you have more and more gas accumulating in the plumbing system, until they can’t get any water up into the leaves. This is really bad news for the plant because this is like having an embolism in a human blood vessel.” Like a human embolism, the gas bubbles stop the flow of fluid. If that persists, it means thirst, starvation and eventually death.

Choat is from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a region that has seen years of record-breaking drought. He wondered: How much drought does it take before trees start choking on air bubbles?

He and a team of researchers studied 226 species of trees around the world, including desert trees, rain forest trees and many others. They discovered that for most, it doesn’t take much drought at all.

“So this is the key thing,” Choat says, “that it would only take a small shift in terms of the moisture environment, the temperature … to push these plants across the threshold.”

The threshold between drinking and choking, that is. The reason there’s so little margin of error is that trees have to finely balance eating and drinking. To eat, they open holes in their leaves, called stomata, to absorb carbon dioxide. But the more they do that, the more they lose water by transpiration through the stomata. Lose too much, and they have to start sucking harder — and risk a deadly embolism.

Choat’s research, in the journal Nature, shows that it doesn’t take much drought before trees start to self-destruct.

But what about trees that have evolved to live in really hot, dry places? They’re sippers, not gulpers.

Plant scientists like Bettina Engelbrecht figured they’d have a larger margin of safety before they choke. “Instead,” she says of Choat’s research, “we find, well, it’s all the same — everyone is right at the edge and has a very risky strategy.”

Engelbrecht, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, studies rain forest trees. “Now, we have to worry about all of them,” she says. “We have to really deal with the problem at the global scale.” That’s because temperatures are rising around the globe. That makes drought more likely and more intense. Big droughts have hit southern Europe, Russia, Australia and the U.S. in recent years.

The first 10 months of 2012 were the warmest ever in the continental U.S. Along with the heat came widespread drought, which still persists in the Southwest.

Nathan McDowell, a plant scientist at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, actually puts trees under plastic to see how they deal with less water and more heat. He says trees are adaptable, up to a point.

“Now we’re changing that climate range really fast,” he notes, “faster than any of the living plants here have experienced. So can they change fast enough to adapt to that? You know, the preponderance of evidence right now is saying that [at] lots of locations around the world, they’re not adapting fast enough.”

When they don’t adapt, they stop growing. Beetles and other insects invade. If droughts last long enough, the forests just die, and get replaced with something else.

Please help me to understand this Straw.... What I've noticed in the past with severe droughts myself is that once a plant has reached it's threshold no amount of water can make it grow and live again...and if it does, it is usually riddled with all kinds of fungal (and other) diseases and bad insects. How can not watering your roses during a drought be a good thing, as stated in the site on the top?

I've started a new thread to focus on growing roses during a drought: hope to see you there :-)

http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3595490/m=23/growing-an-organic-rose-garden-during-a-severe-drought

Jess: Thank you for posting that article, I enjoy reading ludwigroses's on how trees drink water ... didn't know about that. They are right that trees die from drought .. my neighbor spent almost $1,000 to chop down 2 poplar trees ... when we had a dry winter & dry spring, then wet summer. In extreme temp, be it hot or cold, roots need water to be alive.

Paul Zimmerman' roses are grafted on Dr. Huey .. nothing can kill that, including drought .. that's why Dr. Huey-rootstock can sit for the entire year in a dry store, and still alive.

Jess: I love your close-up pics ... it makes me happy, like seeing a micro-heaven inside the roses' petals.

Found more quotes on choices:

God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with him. Jim Elliot

So true, the worst choices in my life were made when I were too impatient to wait, it's like eating junk food just because one is hungry, before the real meal is served. Ms. Hunter could not wait for Presidential Candidate John Edwards' wife to die of cancer ... she had to rush into an affair with John Edwards, costing him his career, and herself a chance for a husband. What we want, what we pursue are often the worst choices for us !! God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with him ... that pertains to doing what's right with God & trust in God rather than pursue our foolishness.

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice. Wayne Dyer

Often people ask how I manage to be happy despite having no arms and no legs. The quick answer is that I have a choice. I can be angry about not having limbs, or I can be thankful that I have a purpose. I chose gratitude. Nick Vujicic

Every person has free choice. Free to obey or disobey the Natural Laws. Your choice determines the consequences. Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices. Alfred A. Montapert

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/choice.html#elSk8vIiFXf1sIZL.99

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.” ― Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

*** From Straw: Very thankful for my husband who did the above, what we choose daily becomes an endearing habit. I'm choosing my treadmill daily, and getting to love it. My kid hated brown rice when she was 3 year-old and asked for those fluffy white noodles ... I gave her zero choice but brown-rice ... she developed a taste for it, now she hates those white noodles, and asks for brown rice !!

You are so blessed to have a husband like that Straw :-)

@jessjennings or any other reader :) Do you perhaps know where I might be able to buy wholesale dried roses that are edible?

Hi Lee: I remember watching a documentary on a chocolate competition. One chocolate-maker went into a Middle-Eastern ethnic store to buy rose-petals to infuse flavor to her chocolate. From Wikipedia: "

Rose water has a very distinctive flavour and is used heavily in Persian and Middle Eastern cuisine—especially in sweets such as nougat, gumdrops, and baklava. For example, rose water is used to give some types of Turkish delight (Rahat lokum) their distinctive flavours.

The Cypriot version of mahalebi uses rosewater.[6][unreliable source?] In Iran, it is also added to tea, ice cream, cookies and other sweets in small quantities, and in the Arab world, Pakistan and India it is used to flavour milk and dairy-based dishes such as rice pudding. It is also a key ingredient in sweet lassi, a drink made from yogurt, sugar and various fruit juices, and is also used to make jallab. Some people in India also use rose water as spray applied directly ... It is also used in Indian sweets and other food."