Brandon, that is an excellent video and the roses you show are so beautiful. I would think that taking care of a lawn would be a lot more work than growing a few roses. They don't need to be mowed and edged every week after all!

Brandon - love your comments! I agree with all of them. I have 100+ roses, and the only time I spend much effort with them is once a year, when some of them (not all - the teas and chinas never get pruned, and hardly ever have much dead growth at all - I have no idea why) need to be pruned. I prune mostly to keep a rose in bounds. Luckily I only have 2-3 HTs, so most of my roses don't need to be pruned to bloom.

Most of the roses I add to the garden are from rooted cuttings already favorite roses in my garden, or old roses I find in my neighborhood (which has lots of antique roses surviving on old properties) which have proved that they love the conditions here. Since those are mostly ones which were hybridized in the 19th century or at least 100 years ago, I don't feel guilty about reproducing them. So, they are "free" insofar as I do not pay anyone for them. I used to order a lot of roses from nurseries. Many of them did NOT like the conditions here, so they are gone, and the ones which survived have joined the ranks of happy ones.

Jackie

Hey Brandon,

Thanks for sharing your video! I love that you shared that you are no-spray. I am also on the no-spray journey. Just this year I was at one of my local nurseries checking out their fresh rose shipment when I told one of the workers I had to be selective because I plan to grow them no-spray. He immediately replied that you can't grow roses no-spray. I have heard this multiple times from my various local nurseries. Yet, I have had a no-spray garden for years.

My point is it gave me a tremendous amount of anxiety about growing roses when I heard him say that even though I knew of my own experiences. I did not feel the need to explain anything to him about how in fact you can... It just didn't seem worth my time.

I feel many rose-curious gardeners hear the exact same and are presented with an entire regime of products that must be purchased on a routine basis to complement the plants that will no doubt actually need those products to thrive. It can be overwhelming.

It is so sad that many people working in "local nurseries" (not the specialty by mail nurseries) are really just retail clerks, and don't know anything about roses at all. That would not be a problem, if they just said "I don't know". The problem is when they continue to chant all of the old incorrect shibboleths about roses: You MUST spray every 14 days; you MUST hard prune roses; You MUST deadhead repeat blooming roses; You MUST remove all of the old leaves each year (whether diseased or not); and pick up every single leaf that falls off a rose, etc etc......

No wonder most people think roses are impossibly difficult to grow!

Jackie