I’m not advocating FOR RMV, however how long a variety may limp along once infected is going to vary greatly depending upon the variety and your climate and conditions. I’ve personally observed RMV infected commercial varieties which grew and flowered for DECADES in public and private gardens in and around the Los Angeles area. There was a bush of the old 1928 HT, Autumn in the rose garden at The Huntington Library which had grown there for decades and expressed dramatically patterned, green and yellow paisleyed leaves. It traditionally grew to over 6’ tall and produced enormous flowers at the end of every cane. I used to joke that in that case, with that rose, the virus likely inhibited it sufficiently to prevent it from invading the rest of that bed. That climate traditionally didn’t suffer the extremes of heat and cold which could destroy the infected types elsewhere. If you live where there are hard freezes, the plant may be sufficiently weakened by viruses to succumb to them. It’s possible they may also sufficiently weaken them to the point of dying in extreme heat events.
I first became aware of the fruit virus infections in roses in the early 1980s, and began observing how widespread it was in commercial roses by visiting all of the large public gardens as well as browsing the many large commercial bud and bloom rose sellers in the area at the time. As I met more and more fellow “rose nuts” with large collections, I observed their virused plants, too. At that time, you either grew what there was, whether it showed symptoms or not, or you didn’t grow the variety. It wasn’t possible to easily obtain MANY varieties without viral infection.
RMV was observed early, and reported in the American Rose Annual of 1928 or 1929 as “Infectious Chlorosis of Roses”. I have scans of the article but not on this new computer. It will take time digging them out of a back up not easily accessed. All through the second half of the last century, a number of European rose growers complained bitterly about how cavalier the US producers were concerning infection. All of the All America Rose Selection roses were produced by Armstrong Roses which became infamous for their virused roses. It was virtually impossible to obtain AARS winners which were NOT RMV infected. Back in the mid 1990s, John Walden, formerly Keith Zary’s assistant at J&P R&D, visited my Newhall garden. I asked him how they could have released such a weak, terrible variety as Purple Tiger, as in that climate, it only flourished potted and on “total parental nutrition”, literally the highest culture you could possible provide it, He laughed and responded, “if you think it’s bad now, you should have seen it BEFORE we cleaned the virus from it!”. He stated that J&P bought Armstrong for their patents as their stock was so badly virused, they burned it in the fields.
As most of the larger producers not only offered newer types but also many OGRs, they were also severely infected as they were passed from one producer to the next, picking up different types of viruses as well as different strengths of the same type. As the older roses fell from the larger catalogs, they all filtered down into the Roses of Yesterday and Today catalog, which, I have been told by several sources, used the same producer in Wasco, CA that Armstrong used to produce their stock. So, any roses which may have escaped infection over the decades, surely suffered it while being produced by ROYAT. I have collected as many of their yearly catalog listings as I’ve been able to gain access, to create the historic archive on HMF of all the varieties they offered for the years listed in the archive. It is highly probable that if a rose was offered in that listing, it was infected. Remember that Dr. Griffith Buck was good friends with Dorothy Stemler, Will Tillotson’s secretary and potentially more, and the majority of his roses were introduced by ROYAT. The few Dr. Buck may not have infected using his preferred root stock were surely infected by ROYAT as they produced them; Back in the early 1990s, a long-time rose friend and I visited ROYAT and observed the rampant RMV symptoms in their display gardens. We were taken up the hill to the area they kept their bare roots planted in paper pots. The symptoms were obvious and rampant there, too. My friend exclaimed, “they’re all virused!”. The response was, “mom says it’s chlorosis”, referring to Patricia Wiley, Dorothy Stemler’s daughter, who operated and owned the business at the time.
Much has been accomplished in the decades since to heat treat and clean many varieties and it’s now possible to find uninfected plants of many of them. But, there are still many old plants around carrying multiple viral loads from many different viruses. A lovely “found rose” from San Rafael, CA from an old garden, named Schmidt’s Smooth Yellow and may well be the old George Elger poly, has been tested and found to have not only RMV but PNRS viruses. I find no catalog or garden listings to document George Elger has been commercially available in the US since around the time of WWII, yet it survived in the garden where a woman planted it around her family home. It survived her and the family’s residence there long enough to be discovered and collected by a local rose lover.
Viral infection is not an automatic death sentence for a rose. It’s also not a desirable occurrence, either. I’ve seen no proof insects spread it, though sloppy propagation will. If you grow any varieties commercially produced in the US prior to probably 2000, you may well have a rose infected with RMV. If any of them were produced in the US in the 1970s or before, you very probably do have infected plants. They can remain asymptomatic for many decades until stresses cause them to express symptoms.
As I earlier wrote, I’m not advocating for infection, however, if your climate is the type which doesn’t outright kill roses and there are older types you want to grow, but can’t find documented indexed stock of them, you may well be able to grow them successfully for many years. But. be aware of their status and if you choose to breed with them, consider only using them for seed parents as infected pollen may pose a potential risk for spread.
