Your second photo says "Yes, it's RRD". That's a year old cane (from the vertical beginnings of wood-iness, and the break on the right is what should be normal. .

The breakS above it to the left are so massive. It's not just the one ugly break but the lateral bud axils, both of them have started to break.

When I first started seeing RRD, I decided that three adjectives needed to apply: Excessive, Aberrant and Unexpected. Your picture matches all three.

The stem calipers (diameters) are also not making logical sense: the new growth is very close to being wider than the old growth, and that's not the way roses work, unless they have something aberrant happening.

Sorry.

Texas Ben,

What variety is the suspect rose?

Moses

Ann,

Thanks so much for responding, I was very much hoping you’d see my post. I’ll keep those adjectives in mind, ‘Excessive’ , ‘Aberrant’ and Unexpected. And those do indeed describe two canes...they have these huge new growths, while the rest of the plant has barely broken dormancy. The plant next to this one had RRD last fall. I’ll remove this one in the morning and hope for no more infections.

The unexpected sometimes just hits us in the face.

The first RRD in my garden happened when we had taken out a 'volunteer' wild rose that was a bird dropped multiflora seedling. (Darn.) My husband dug it out midsummer and it put up one puny cane in August. September came with a ground cracking drought, and the cracks in the ground were right next to the volunteer cane. Then suddenly every leaf axil on that cane sprouted aberrant new growth

A midwinter thing I saw on RRD sick roses in other peoples' gardens. Winter had hit, rose leaves were brown and canes were totally dormant. Out of the dark, came single massive bright green canes with gnarly looking leaves at every leaf axil. Bright Green. When nothing else was. The canes quickly died in the next freeze, but really unexpected.