Well ooohhh! That is fairly gross

I hate this freaking season😩😩😩

It's a harmless fungus or slime mold. Nothing to worry about at all.

Magpie, really? Even though it is hard as a rock?

Yes. In different stages of its life cycle, or sometimes during times of unfavorable conditions, they can harden while they get ready for the right time to release spores. Nbd.

It could possibly be bacterial crown gall, which would be bad, but looks more like the above to me. But maybe someone who knows a lot about crown gall will see your post and know better than I.

My first thought was crown gall but I have no personal experience with it. Hopefully someone else can chime in with more experience.

Crown Gall is my call!

Steven

That is crown gall.

Looks like a bunch of overcooked cauliflower someone tossed. Diane

Oof, I'm sooo sorry. What a year you've had so far :/ I was hoping Paul would know for sure but I was really hoping it wasn't that.

Ugh. I’ve been gardening 25 years and have escaped this til now. Any idea on how it got this? It’s only been in my yard a year. I sent the picture to David Austin, guess I’ll see if their five year warranty covers this

Ewwww....that's such a disappointment and pretty gross. :(

I have a white kalmia I could put there I suppose. I will have to order another Susan Williams Ellis and then find a different spot for it

OMG! The phrase ”What fresh hell is this?” comes to mind. All that Paul said above plus an exclamation of ”Ugh!” in sympathy and disgust. If I were you, I’d go ahead a remove and bag a chunk of the soil with the rose, replace the soil with fresh and then sterilize the heck out of your tools. As Paul noted, the bacterium hangs around in soil all over the place, so it’s kinda amazing crown gall doesn’t show up every 5 minutes. Infected grafting tools can spread it, too, so there’s a chance your rose arrived a year ago with the infection already present. I‘m guessing that DA will replace your rose without any fuss. If there’s a gap in the rose garden, you can put concrete pavers over the spot and place a potted rose on the pavers. If you want to replant later, I’d wait a good long stretch of time and then try planting a super healthy specimen with undamaged roots in the spot and cross my fingers. Carol

I have pried off crown gall and left the plant in place twice and the plants carried on and are fine years later. I'm not saying this is ideal but Madame Alice Garnier and Long John Silver both survived and are doing well.

Sheila is the doc, and she knows first do no harm. And she was right. Diane

Good grief, that is hideous!

I've had success in saving roses from gall,too-cut it out, scraping along at the cane to make sure I get to clean tissue, then dis-infecting the wound with bleach and sealing it off. But I've also ditched quite a few, too. For me, it mostly seems to just show up in plants that are weakened excessively by overly poor conditions. But this certainly doesn't seem to be the case for everybody.

Oursteelers, so sorry you are having one of those seasons!

Sheila, if I were to keep it, should I put it in a pot? Would that perhaps stop from spreading?

@oursteelers 8B PNW If you're going to keep it, isolating in to its own pot is a reasonable option. But far more importantly, do NOT use any tools on this rose and then use them on any of your other roses (without heat sterilizing the tools) because that is the primary method of spread.

@oursteelers 8B PNW Just my two cents (again) in case it’s helpful. If not, just toss it aside. Since your rose is only a year old, I’d ask DA to replace it with a non diseased one. Your new rose should catch up pretty quickly. If it wasn’t infected before arrival, chances are it was weak in ways that made it vulnerable once planted since all your other established roses are okay. My last DA batch had lots of broken roots. I‘d be inclined to try to save old, very established roses or very rare ones but not readily available, young roses. The odds of cross infection, and my absent mindedness when I get distracted in the garden, mean that I’d likely forget to dunk my tools in a sterilizing solution at some point during some spring pruning. If you do decide to keep your infected rose, a pot is a very good idea! As Paul said, just sterilize those Felcos EVERY time you prune! And again, I’m sending empathy for this additional fresh h3ll of a garden chore. Hopefully, you’ll get a break in the rain so you don’t have to don hip waders while digging! What a spring! Carol

Carol. I look like a damned drowned rat. ALL I’m doing is tying things up. EVERYTHING is flat!!!!! Including my hair🤦🏻‍♀️🙄

Nope. I’m getting rid of it. I never heat sterilize so I’m probably already screwed. I did wipe my pruners with bleach after I was done clipping her soggy blooms yesterday but I didn’t realize they needed boiling water.

I probably contaminated everything.

To hell with a glass of wine….I’m having a whole bottle. And bread. Lots of bread. And maybe some online shopping

Ha, ha! I’ve sooo been there! Don’t worry too much about whether you infected your other roses at this point. The bleach solution probably worked fine. Good luck with DA, and sending speed to a replacement.

All of us PNW gardeners are drowned rats this year! I think I accidentally entered a wet tee shirt contest. Ugh. I’m sending you much plant tie and garden stakes empathy! My Maiden’s Blush fell off the fence and is arching way into my back yard. The only thing holding her up is the paneled collie barrier around the bed. My Blush Noisette broke free of its ties and her mass of rain-soaked blooms collapsed onto my potted Midnight Blue. The top of my 10-foot-tall HT Black Magic had to be hastily lashed to the porch post so it wouldn’t snap in half. I just took a hot bath. Carol

Portland Carol and Oursteelers....💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛. Count me as a drowned rat. I just hope that this means we have a lovely summer and a very quiet, relatively smokeless fire season.

Bleach is a very effective sterilant. I just don't typically recommend it because its very hard on bare metal blades. If you do it often, you'll corrode the blades pretty badly, requiring much more frequent sharpening.

I just left my two where they were and nothing else has gotten the infection in any visible fashion. In fact both those roses are doing very well and put out multiple new basals.

That's interesting Shelia. I did the same thing with a rose that had some other kind of infection. I grow organically and if a plant can't take care of itself it gets pulled. I've already had experiences with other plants in the garden that had a NOID disease and I allowed it to just run it's course and the plant eventually came back to normal. I have no idea what the infection was, I was just going to let it run it's course and experiment and see if it was able to deal with it on it's own and come back. It was Savannah rose, from a reputable seller and it became infected in late summer it's first season in my garden. It was not near another rose and had not been planted where a rose had been before. I was pretty sure I wasn't seeing symptoms of the dreaded Rose virus, so I left it.

The next spring it came back and grew and bloomed and looked okay but didn't perform well, but I thought it was over it. Then this year, the third season in the garden, right away I knew something was wrong with it. I didn't prune it right away watching to see what it was going to do. It pushed out some initial foliage but was behind other roses and the foliage was just not growing except on one cane. Had actually started to shrivel up. So I cut the others back to the ground and left one cane. That grew but started to discolor and I thought I would let it bloom once and then cut it back to the ground. It just got worse so I didn't even wait, I cut it back to the ground. I had already seen new growth at the base. Now I have 3 main canes growing about a foot off the ground and the foliage looks okay. Not discolored and it's growing slowly. It has a couple of buds on it. I do use alcohol on my tools after use. I see Paul recommends heat, which I didn't realize was required. Does that mean you can boil your Felco pruners? Doesn't that lead to rust?

So the jury is still out, but now that's two seasons that I'm losing for roses there. Do I wish I had taken it out? Well, I wouldn't have planted another rose there. And I've had another area open up where I can add a rose, so I'm still content to experiment to see where it goes from here. I put compost around it in early spring. I'm making sure it stays well watered. All my other roses that are at least 12 ft away from where that rose is growing are growing better than ever this year. And nothing in the vicinity of that rose looks to be affected.

In my two roses I left in place after removing a crown gall, I really do not prune. That removes some risk of spread obviously.

OTOH I have a Rosa eglanteria that is afflicted with mossy gall and that plant is weak. It leafed out late. I tried to pull on it to see if gophers got the roots and it did not pull out. It has bloomed smaller blooms than normal. I have read this is usually a harmless affliction. Gophers may have gotten part of the roots and the mossy gall has nothing to do with the plant weakening.

Just to tidy up this conversation, David Austin agrees it is crown gall and is sending a new SWE with my spring order.

That's nice that you're getting a replacement from them, I hope the new one does wonderfully for you.

I just wanted to update, that I took a close look today at the rose 'Savannah' that had an infection of some kind with very discolored foliage and lack of growth and growth that had just dried up on the canes this spring, and I did cut it all back to the ground. I have 3 new canes from the base and they all have buds. One bud opened and I have a very pretty rose. Smaller than usual, but looks perfectly healthy as does the foliage and the canes. So, I have hope that it will recover fully and next year will perform normally.

Great news oursteelers that you are getting a new replacement rose!

Oursteelers - that's great :) :) I'm glad you told them.

Prairiemoon - that's good news. :) :)

I am so glad you are receiving a replacement! That is as it should be, and DA is honoring its commitment to send you a healthy rose. Your new plant should catch up in no time! Meanwhile, we’re finally getting sunshine mixed with the showers, and the photos you have posted of roses in bloom are both heartening and gorgeous! And I love your before and after photos on Kit’s thread. So much planning, scheduling and hard work in the cracks of all the other planning, scheduling and work of daily life (including the beautiful, hair pulling chaos of grandparenting), and such magnificent results! Your garden is PNW paradise!! Carol

Thank you, Carol. It is a balance, isn’t it? I just put my grandson down for a nap and am going out to weed for a little bit before I take my fifteen year old to the gym.

Plus doing the laundry for my father in law who just moved in with us! Lots of multi generational stuff going on right now!

Oh my goodness! You’re a grandparent. That's wonderful! I just edited ”parenting” and added ”grand” in front of it to make ”grandparenting”. 😊 Good luck with the naptime weeding. Gardening is all done in the skinny moments here and there, right? Multigenerational families: It looks like you have a lovely home for lots of family! But I know things do get crunchy in between all the layers. I am of the sandwich age, too, just doing the parenting part later in life. Have a lovely afternoon! Carol