Several years ago we lost our huge old 'Belle Portugaise', which had grown to about 20+ feet tall, to some sort of gall on its roots. Ugh! Anyway, we had our gardener dig it up. Here is a pic just part of the top of it when it was blooming - it was much wider than this. Gave me a crick in my neck to look at it, but the blooms were one of the loveliest of all of my roses. I have seen BP in the gardens (or just unkempt lots) of many old old houses around our neighborhood - it is evidently a great survivor in our climate conditions.

About 3 years ago, when we heard that our town was going to pass a law making growing roses (or anything else) touching our house illegal, I started thinking about what roses I wanted to save. I was hoping we could move some of the most precious ones, but in case of accidents I started to root those, so I would have more than one plant. I said to myself that I should go find one of those old old BPs and root it too, but I never got around to it.

All of my little "trying to root" cuttings - I had about 12, got put on our back porch, and our front porch, in 1 gallon plastic bags, and then in small pots under upside down small fish tanks as usual. Most of them just sat there, but did not die. As some of them did die, and I took other cuttings, eventually most of the labels I had put on them fell off or faded, and all of the pots got mixed up. One rose I really cared about rooting was Le Vesuve. I have 2 healthy plants of it growing happily in the garden which do not need to be moved, but a friend of mine really wanted one from my plants, which were from cuttings of an ancient huge one in our garden. In my experience LV has been way harder for me to root than other roses. So, I was very happy when it grew roots and made a small plant. I transplanted it into a larger pot, and then it gradually and very slowly got bigger. I was sending my friend photos of it as it grew. Actual years past, COVID happened, drought and water restrictions happened, and my rooted cuttings got sort of neglected. I had to re-do some of the cuttings (I am trying to root LV, Pax, Reve d'Or, and a few others), and they all got moved around. The furthest forward was my LV, although now it was just sort of sitting there.

Last Fall I moved the LV, which was getting bigger again, into a VERY large pot, and put it in the sun where I had to pass it frequently, and could make sure it was getting water. About 6 months ago (our growing season here is 12 months, so the roses don't go dormant) it suddenly started putting out longer canes, and much larger leaves. Hmmm...it did not really look like LV. So, I decided to just let it grow, so I could find out which of the other roses I was rooting it really was, assuming that I had mixed it up. Two months ago I looked at it carefully, and its canes had leapt out of its pot, over the ner by tomato cage, and across the bed to a structure I have Colonial White (aka Sombreuil) growing on, as well as Cl Crimson Glory. As my eye followed the "not LV" canes, and untangled them mentally from the other roses, I realized they were 7-8 feet long! Definitely NOT LV! Very interested now in finding out who this was. Then in early Feb it started setting buds, and as they got bigger and bigger, and longer and longer, it hit me that they, and the leaves, looked like Belle Portugaise, but that was impossible. This was not a seedling planted by some bird - this was a cutting that I had planted myself. I thought and thought, and eventually remembered that right after BP died, which was at least a year before I started my mass (for me) rose rooting project, I did try to root BP, but it did not work. Ha! The first bud bloomed a couple of days ago - here is a picture of it:

Definitely IS Belle Portugaise, so somehow that cutting I tried to root survived, or made roots which survived my next rooting project, and it is now in its huge-but-not-big-enough pot, waiting to be planted in the new garden my DH made for me for our rose refugees! Go figure.

Jackie