This has been on my wishlist as well . I don’t grow it but heirloom offers both the climber and the shrub ! :)

for some reason houzz no longer lets me link things but its on their website

Gotta love Burling.

I don't grow it, and even if I did, it wouldn't help you, but every year I try to get it I can't, then it's available when I'm focusing on other areas of the garden. It has that old-fashioned tea rose look. Northland has had it from time to time.

I was wondering about Burling, and if it would only make her life more stressful if we placed orders right now. An onslaught of orders might make her day, but maybe she's got more pressing things to attend to. Your thoughts?

That’s wonderful, Jackie! Burling is a gift to us all!! Is your climbing MCT one of the roses that came with your house? If so, did you decide to root any cuttings to share with others? You have such tough and healthy antique plants that I have begun to think of your garden as a historical preservation site, but I know as individuals we also need to do what works for our lives, and we can’t save everything. MCT is such a beauty! I see why you want to keep her near. There are still some old plants thriving around Portland, probably left over from the mass planting for ”The City of Roses” so many years ago. After the pandemic, I should talk John into driving around and rustling some cuttings with me! My climate is heating up but not yet CA temps. For whatever it is worth, even after decades of growth, most of the shrub MCTs seem to top out at about 6’ here. Carol

I do grow 'Mme. Caroline Testout' (the standard "bush" form), in Corvallis - a somewhat cooler climate. Our specimen is probably 70 years old or more and it grows under the eaves of the garage (north light with some late day sun) and it has never exceeded 7 feet tall.

I find it to be much more generous with bloom than the climbing version, FWIW.

Lilyfinch - Thank you for the info! If Burling does not have it, I will order it from Heirloom.

portlandmysteryrose - Here comes another story about how I acquired my Climbing MCT. I did not inherit it in our garden from my DH's ancestors, but when we moved in (30+ years ago) I could see some pink roses blooming in the trees of a house one house away from ours. That house had been empty for years, but every Spring and Summer, I could see the roses all over 2-3 trees. I peeked into the back yard, and it was full of rusting washers and dryers, and old refrigerators. I called the City, as the refrigerators were the old old kind which could have trapped children inside of them. The City put a tax (lien - another one - it already had several) on the house and got the long distance owners to get rid of the junk, and built fences & gates so that no one could get into the back of the property.

Then, a few years later, I saw builders and painters fixing it up, and shortly it went on the market (I called the realtor, who told me that she had had ONE TON of debris removed from the house and basement!). Anyway, low and behold, shortly a moving van appeared one day. The first thing out of the moving van were 30+ roses in pots! I am not making this up! Of course I wandered over with some cookies and coffee to greet the new neighbors. They were very nice. I asked about the roses, and of course the lady was a rose collector, and we chatted. I told her about the pink roses in her back yard. She told me that there were NO roses growing in her back yard, but we agreed to get together there in a couple of weeks after they had finished moving in. I did go over, and she took me into the back yard. The pink rose was not blooming then, and when I looked for it where I thought it had to be rooted, all I saw was a giant old blackberry bush. I persisted, as I knew there was a rose in there somewhere! Sure enough, rose canes were growing through and up from the blackberry bush. So the new owner and I got our clippers, and after a couple of hours we had completely cleared the blackberries, and revealed not one, not two, but three draggely rose bushes which had been eaten by the blackberries. She took good care of them, and the next Spring they were back blooming in her trees again . I got some cuttings and rooted them, and the roses was Cl MCT (all three bushes). 30 years on, I can still see them in the tree tops behind that house. So, it was an old old cultivar I got the cutting from. It turned out, when I told my DH's parents about the rose, that the family who lived and gardened in that house in the 1920s was friends with my DH's grandparents who lived in our house then.

So, I am hoping that the clone which I get of the bush form will be a nice old one too.

Jackie

Paul - thanks for the info about your MCT bush. I am especially happy to hear about the more blooming!

Re Burling - she did look, and got back to me yesterday - only one day after my original inquiry. Amazing service! Unfortunately she did not have one now, but Lilyfinch was right - Heirloom has it, and I have ordered one from them.

Jackie

@jacqueline9CA What a lovely story of how you acquired the rose. What an interesting life you lead 😊

Life in an old neighborhood, where the houses were built from the 1880s through the 1920s, is certainly interesting from a roses point of view. I think the reason is that many of the houses stayed in the same families for generations, not just ours. So, the gardens and roses remained, as the area slowly changed, and some apartment buildings appeared, and the old houses were mostly rentals. When we moved in 30+ years ago, that was the situation. However, over the next 10-20 years lots of the remaining old houses were purchased by new, young families, and became owner occupied again. We fixed up our house, and that was happening all over the neighborhood.

Families with young children do not have a lot of time to garden (and we are not talking wealthy people moving in around here - most of them have been first time homeowners) , so many of the old roses continued to grow in gardens, subject to "benign neglect". I have managed to accumulate clones of very old cultivars from old neglected gardens near-by of not only Cl MCT, but Niles Cochet, Fortune's Double Yellow, The Rose of Many Names, Lamarque, and several others, as well of course as roses I rescued from our own old old garden.

Jackie

Jackie, I am sorry you have to get rid of your Cl MCT. I love mine - growing on a fence, not on the house. It is really a bit too big for the fence, but that is the option I have (unless I move it to the taller back fence - food for thought.) I think I told you that it looks as though Anna Olivier is going to make it, whew. The water-every-other-day regimen you suggested worked.

So glad your Anna Olivier is OK. I have found that anytime a rose is transplanted or otherwise severely injured, flooding it with water (as long as it has good drainage, of course) will keep it alive long enough to grow some roots to replace the damaged ones.

Jackie

Hi, Jackie - Here's a full-plant photo of one of the old MCT's that still grow all over Portland as Carol mentioned. This one grows in a parking strip in my old neighborhood. It has full southern exposure and is about a foot away from a tree . If I remember correctly, at the time I took the picture, my neighbor did not realize what it was. Later, I told him about Portland's history with planting MCT all around town in preparation for the Lewis & Clark Exposition, and he began to take loving care of it. But as you can see, it doesn't really require loving care. This plant was about 6 ft tall and bloomed repeatedly all season, even before it was deadheaded or given extra water.

Carol, count me in on your post-pandemic Portland rose-rustling adventures! :-)

John

Thank you, John! That is a lovely picture. I so love that Portland still has a lot of bushes of MCT remaining from the famous mass planting in ~ 1905. I can't wait to get my new MCT from Heirloom. It seems meant, as that was the only nursery I could find it in on the West Coast, and Heirloom is quite near Portland.

Jackie