On Mon, 12 May 2003 15:14:47 GMT, (Shiva) wrote:

On Sun, 11 May 2003 23:37:55 -0400, Henry
wrote:

They had both Pat Austin and Jude the Obscure (among others) but I
decided I'd go with this one for now. After all, it's Mother's Day so I
couldn't buy too much for myself. Jude is still on my list. Johnson's
is overpriced so even at 20% off it was $32 but it's a lovely, large,
healthy plant so I guess it's worth it.


Sometimes the sheer ease of picking up a big healthy specimen of a
rose you really want at a pricey local garden center is worth the
extra money. My Pat Austin is a Muncy's ownroot, and I do recommend
Ken and Suzie Muncy for ownroot roses. They will not ship to
California, but they will ship to you. There is a website:

http://www.muncyrose.com/

If you look, remember that the price includes shipping. The one-gallon
ownroot of Jude the Obscure is $16.95. (You can also get a
three-gallon grafted Jude for $26.95 total, including shipping.) The
roses come packed kind of funky but are always intact and, best of
all, they take off like weeds! I planted Pat Austin, Golden
Celebration, Tradescant, and three Abraham Darbys last fall (not a
really good idea here as we can have nippy winters) and they came
through GREAT despite just a few oak leaves for insulation. And they
were so small! Each has produced 10-15 roses so far, that's how much
they have grown!

He has a nice list of Austins, Henry! Check our Happy Child!

One thing worth noting is that Muncy's roses are all fortuniana
rootstock. This means that for those of us in zone 6b and north,
special care has to be taken with winter care. For a long time, it was
thought that this rootstock really didn't do well here in Nashville.
Now it turns out that it does just fine, we just have to do the high
mulch and leaf mounding that those in zones 5 and 4 have to do
routinely, something that we normally don't have to worry too much
about. Plus, there are another couple of minor considerations as well.
Someone wrote an article in the local rose society newsletter about
growing them as an experiment and he had some good success.