"Bob Bauer" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:34:50 GMT, "Mark. Gooley"
wrote:

Frederic Mistral, a Meilland Romantica-series hybrid tea I
bought at the same time, is putting out a lot of fine blooms,
not too obnoxious in form for a hybrid tea. Small bush,
not really my style,

Small bush for you now, but this rose gets big. I mean really really
big and is a fast grower. 7 feet tall and wide in 2 to 3 years.
Needs a hard spring pruning to keep it under control after that.

Wow. And I was kvetching about how small the Romanticas are.
I hope mine grows that well. I have the room.

reputedly cold-tender,

Survives fine in my Zone 6 climate. Hot and dry summer cold winter.

Shows that I can't trust everything that I read. Anyway, cold isn't
really a problem here in 8b. (Just have to have drip irrigation ready
because you never know when the rains will fail; until a couple days
ago everything was flooded, and some roses in the ground were suffering;
now I have to start watering again.)

but I find myself liking it.

You should like it, because it is one of the truly great roses. It is
consistently the best smelling modern rose I know of. It is also
vigorous to the point of almost being everblooming.

It does smell great. I need to get over my prejudices about roses,
namely against hybrid teas. (The Austin roses have pretty much
conquered my prejudice against modern cultivars, to the point of
my wanting modern everblooming ramblers.) True, I still dislike
the stereotypical hybrid-tea form, but not all of them have it, and
more and more recent cultivars have strong and attractive scent.
And many of them are also remarkably tough and vigorous.

It never pays to get hidebound. Thanks for helping me get away
from that.

Mark.