Good afternoon. One of the features I find so valuable of this forum is finding out how healthy a given rose is in a certain area of the country. In that light, I'd like to report how my establishes roses are doing this fine April 2017.

I believe we had a slightly warmer than normal and average precipitation spring here in the Piedmont of NC.

The most unusual event was a very serious spell of frosts after all the roses had begun to leaf out. Most of my roses had broken dormancy and put on a few inches of new red growth when frost struck: we had something like four nights in a row of lows from 25 to 22 degrees.

Most of my roses survived the frost with little die-back, but I think it led to a weakening of the plant tissues. I had my first ever cases of powdery mildew this spring, it was awful! I am a conservative sprayer, so all the disease I have noticed appeared before I started any spring spraying.

Roses which came through with no apparent disease:
- Crocus rose
- Madame Lombard
- Ducher
- Munstead Wood
- Maggie
- Mrs BR Cant

Roses with light fungal diseases (some PM, some BS)
- Tiny Rose de Rescht
- Tiny Abraham Darby
- Third year Sombreuil (growing slowly in shade)

Roses which mildewed, in some places quite heavily:
- souvenir de la Malmaison
- Belinda's Dream
- Francis Debreuil

Roses with blackspot
- Francis Debreuil, quite badly as usual. It lost about half its leaves before I even got the sprayer out. I would remove this rose except I love the color and fragrance of the blooms so much.
- Climbing iceberg (noticeable, hopefully controlled by spraying now)
- Lower leaves of Mr Lincoln
- Lower leaves of SDLM
- Lower leaves of White Cecile Brunner

Roses with cercospora
- Belinda's Dream. She gets this very badly every spring, but last year tebuconazole spraying until the heat arrived helped greatly. I gave her a firm pruning of diseased growth, and she should be vigorous.

In general I'm most surprised with Mr. Lincoln. For a supposedly a classic fussy hybrid tea, he's not been anywhere near the worst in terms of disease. Climbing iceberg (planted before I knew what I was doing) and Francis Debreuil would die without spray. Crocus Rose has also been a very reliable rose in a zero-spray location (amongst herbs destined for my kitchen). Munstead Wood holds out, but slowly loses foliage to BS through the year so I give in and spray it occasionally. Same for SDLM.

Maggie has been reasonably healthy in a no-spray location (planted amongst blackberries), but she never looks quite vigorous, always has a paler leaf color and hasn't burst in size like I was expecting.

And now, some pictures!

Crocus rose:

Maggie (the blooms are so luscious in real life, they have the quartered pattern but are very 3-D):

How'd this bunny get in here?