Librarian, I call that canker and cut off the dead branches. If I see a wound and the peripheral growth looks normal I leave it for now.

I wonder if freeze/thaw in the Spring has something to do with it.

I also get some sunburn on canes that can eventually kill them.

I was going to guess rose stem girdler, so thank you Sheila for your diagnosis!

I have stem girdler too here and that is different, Vapor. The outside of the cane shows a bulge with girdler, but there is no scalded burned look. They are both no picnic. There are good girdler photos on google too.

Thank you both, i was wondering if it was girdler, too, but it was looking different to me than all the photos of girder shared in an earlier post.

The dead growth is new...as in, it's appeared after we stopped having hard freezes, would the canker do that? Make it hard for the plant to maintain new growth?

We did have a lot of nights into the low 20s this year, and much later than normal. I know this is a more tender rose, too.

Well, I took your suggestion and looked online and now I think that it could definitely be girdler, at least the last cane photo. Time to prune.

That new damage can happen here too, Librarian. It seemed to be aggravated by freeze/thaw I thought. One of the Australian ladies had/has some kind of blight that affected her roses. I doubt freeze/thaw is a factor there.

Maybe Paul or Kim will chime in for an expert opinion.

You can have both canker and girdler, librarian, like I do here. They are usually on different plants. I see the girdler more on rugosas.

Thank you so much, Paul and Sheila. I've learned so much from you and keep learning! I feel very lucky to have this rose forum.

My one cane wonder Abe Darby had the same thing . A month ago I cut him down to the ground. It was a bit scary but new healthy growth has come back.

I found that once my teas had canes that were three and four years old, that freeze caused canker at the site of a new bud would damage that side of the cane, but it wouldn't kill the cane , just about 3mm radius around the dead leaf axil.

Other rose diseases intervened, but the next thing I had hoped to try was finger pruning off the new but dead buds just after the latest freeze and spraying a broad spectrum fungicide to see if that would limit or kill the start of a canker.