Moving potted Roses

Rose Growing
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I have a Miniature/Patio rose, “Peter Pan”, growing in a big pot that is too heavy to easily move, especially with all the autumn rain recently. It is now late October. I want to give this rose to a friend who has a car, but we would have to carry it quite a long way to her car, and even trying to use a contraption on wheels I can’t see how to do this easily.

Could I get this rose out of the pot, which it shares with a Cyclamen, and put it in a smaller pot for transportation, then plant in my friend’s open garden? As it isn’t currently growing in the ground, there are not really any issues of damaging its roots. The pot it is growing in is probably bigger than its needs, though this particular rose, Peter Pan, does seem to prefer a bigger pot (I think it will be happiest when settled in the open ground of a garden). I read everywhere that you should only transplant roses in the depths of winter, January, when they are completely dormant, but we need to do this now. Any advice please.

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it would be okay as long as you lift it up without damaging rootball.
i prefer just a plastic bag and paper box than a pot when i move rose.

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You didn’t mention your location, and don’t have it marked on your name-page, so advice is difficult.
HERE in the PNW, October is an excellent month to plant roses, as we have (typically) several weeks before the ground will freeze, and even then it’s not for long. All my roses are in pots as I am not a landowner.

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I am not good at acronyms, but guessed maybe PNW stands for Pacific North West?

I am on the South Coast of England. I think our area gets described as a 9, a narrow strip along the South Coast of England, (though areas described as a 9 in America probably get much hotter summers). Very mild winters that almost never get frost, or very briefly at night in the very depths of winter. Most years don’t get snow. Summers only get a few days where you need to protect against UVB. Typical maritime climate, combined with Urban Heat Island effect, similar to London. About this time of year we get heavy rains which last until about April or May, when we don’t need to water the garden, and the summers are drier and gardens need watering pretty much daily.

It is colder here now than August, when we had a few heatwaves, and the roses are starting to fall asleep for the winter, they still have the odd flower, and their hips are turning red. Peter Pan loses some of its leaves around now whereas some of my other roses still have abundant leaves.

It is common to hear people with London gardens say that their roses bloom all year. I have had roses that only seem to stop flowering around December and then start flowering again in around late February.

My friend’s garden is very chalky, and when I use a trowel to weed I just seem to hit lumps of chalk, and very thin soil. It needs a lot of added compost, and when I plant anything I take along bricks of Coir to retain moisture and fertiliser (Coir is light to carry, but I know a rose needs plenty of balanced potting compost in its planting hole).

I don’t have the problem of chalky soil, as all my roses are grown in pots. The one rose that I have in the ground, which is a wild Rosa arvensis, doesn’t seem happy, some of its leaves turn white and it is susceptible to all the fungal diseases going, blackspot, mildew and rust. My friend puts used coffee grounds on her garden, which are acidifying and rich in nitrogen, and she is generous with fertiliser which her flowers really thrive on (not in winter, obviously). I have recently started putting used coffee grounds in the soil around the Rosa arvensis, coffee shops give recycled bags of used grounds away for free.

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