Bill:
This weekend, I was re-reading a chapter on roses, in the late Henry
Mitchell's book "The Essential Earthman". There's some good advice on
resistant varieties. Definitely worth buying the book. I see Barnes & Noble
has it available.
Doug

"Bill Oliver" wrote in message
...

As I noted in a previous post, I am recently getting interested in
taking a more active role in my back yard. We have an older place with
an "established" landscaping, meaning a bunch of plants that have been
allowed to run wild for 20 years. I have, for the past decade or so,
taken the Darwinistic approach to gardening -- plant lots of plants
more or less at random and cheer on the survivors.

Among the survivors are a number of old garden roses. They are very
bushy,
about 4 or 5 feet in diameter and about 6 feet high. They bloom like
crazy this time of the year -- there are probably 50 good-sized blooms
on each. The only thing I have done with them in the past decade has
been to cut them back from pathways so I could get in and out of the
backyard.

At the moment they are are very green, but in a couple of weeks, all
the leaves will turn yellow and fall off. It starts with a few
black spots, then the entire leaf turns yellow, and then falls
off. By the end of the summer, all I have are green skeletons of
the bushes with a few new leaves where new growth is. It looks
like something out of an Addams Family movie. The roses look like
death warmed over by fall, but come out hail and hearty in the
spring.

I live in suburban Maryland, near DC.

Any ideas of what this might be, and what I might do were I to
actually try to do something?