Hello,
I heard that some of you in the northern US and Canada hat a very hard winter with up to -30°C (= -22 °F). Perhaps you may list here which roses survived and which didn’t?
I would like to say what was hardy but we are still, in Edmonton. AB, below a foot of snow with freezing tempratures for a daytime high. J
Maybe ask again in July, winter is not over yet. There is an inch of new snow on the ground here in the past hour.
I live just about the “a” in “Fargo” on this picture. Right in the middle of the 12-18 inch zone.
So far wind but no precipitation.
Edit: it looks like they’ve moved the worst of it farther north, so I’m in the 4-7 inch zone now, with high winds. In any case I won’t be going grocery shopping in Fargo today, nor going out to check on my roses.
I’m kind of excited to see what this particularly cold winter did to the roses, as well as to my experimental outdoor rose seed beds. But we have to wait a little longer to find out.
Looking at the larger growing roses recently in the Twin Cities, I’m really sad that there is a lot of heavy dieback. The ‘William Baffin’ roses I saw that routinely are very cane hardy are black to the snowline as well as many of my usually hardy hybrids of various backgrounds. I was sighing thinking about all the work pruning, but then thought it will probably go fast because I’ll use my pruning saw and cut a lot to the ground. The ‘Lilian Gibson’ plant I have looks good thankfully and the rugosas look okay too.
I don’t have a detailed list of what survived and didn’t because the leaves are still around the roses, but I will say that 90% of what was exposed is dead to at least the mulch line - even those that usually do not die back much. The hardier selections did come out alright. Fortunately I didn’t get as cold as our more northern friends. I suspect, however, that if I have this much dead, anyone significantly north of Des Moines got hit much, much harder.
the funny thing is all except a few of my tenders survived, but that was because they were in pots and were buried in leaves. The only damage was to those that were on the outside of the grouping because the wind blew the leaves around this year. Contractor blankets are looking pretty good right now - maybe I should get enough for all the gardens (after I win the lottery).
The snow is melted enough for some of the roses to be fully exposed, but half of them are still buried in snow. I can see there is quite a bit of die back on almost all the roses, but that’s normal. There was only 6" to 8” of snow on the ground when we had the first really cold temperatures, so most of the roses died back that far. There are very few named varieties that don’t have some die back every year but usually my hardiest roses are the rugosas, the species and their offspring; like Theresa Bugnet and Metis. The Explorer roses are quite hardy also with William Baffin being the hardiest, it never had die back when I had it. I have several offspring of WB that have been very hardy in the past but they look pretty black this spring as well. The Floribundas and Hybrid Teas are the least cold hardy and they usually die back to the ground unless they are well protected. I’ve only lost a few roses to winter kill but sometimes the tender roses get set back quite a bit. I won’t know for sure how well the roses survived this year until they start to bud out which will won’t be for two or three weeks.
I may be able to report something by May but nothing is growing here yet.
After 90+" inches of snow, I’d fear finding Woolly Mammoths in the yard, Sharon!
Is there any information on the cold hardiness of own-root roses versus grafted roses? I grow hybrid teas and floribundas.
I live in central NJ, and the worst dieback this winter was on my grafted roses. The own-root roses did pretty well, even though they were much smaller and the stems much thinner.
All had been newly planted in Spring 2013.
Cathy
Central NJ
No woolly mammoths, Kim, lol! Woke up to some snow on the ground again this morning. Now I have to get through the freeze and thaws so I can go out and really see what’s OK and what’s not.
Good question, Cathy. I’ve never heard of any study on that myself but from experience the own roots do survive a little better than the grafted ones if the grafts aren’t buried.
There is a great study in the Canadian Journal of Plant Science on comparing 10 Explorer roses grafted versus own root. http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18681828 It is in French with an English Summary. Here is the title Impact of propagation method on the growth of 10 rose shrubs of the ExplorerMC Series under natural and extreme winter conditions. They found that under colder more extreme conditions there was more mortality of grafted plants. Additionally, they found that grafted plants led to unpredictable changes in plant architecture and size of some of them. THey compared regular own root cutting propagated roses, tissue culture propagated (also own root), and grafted roses on Rosa multiflora. The tissue culture and cutting propagated plants performed similarly and they were different in multiple ways from the performance of the grafted roses.