"Darren Garrison" wrote:
Bought some two-gallon roses at Wal-Mart today,
myself. I know that it is a big no-no to buy the
hacked-root, packed in sawdust ones but should these
be okay, even though they are from Wal-Mart?
Last week I bought a "Livin' Easy" two-gallon from
there for $12.97 (from Weeks) and the ones I
bought today ranged from $5.97 to $7.88. I bought:

Tropicana
You either like the color or you don't. Oldish garden
standby (1960), good strong fragrance, looks like the
hybrid tea it is. (I'm sick of the shape of HT flowers.)
Gold Glow
1959, also smelly, also a hybrid tea in looks and fact.
One parent was Sutter's Gold, which is a tough oldish
thing, once ubiquitous. Beales has a story about seeing
a huge bush of Sutter's Gold, untended, in Australia.
Chrysler Imperial
Reliable oldish (1952) standard red garden standby.
Also nicely smelly; I'm told it was used to help market
the car of the same name. Said to be prone to powdery
mildew.
Eureka
Dunno. There's a recent (2002) Kordes rose of that name.
Yellow, not very smelly, but Kordes roses tend to be
tough as nails. Floribunda, probably won't grow large.

And one yellow and orange called "Novelty" that
appears to be a description rather than the name of
the plant.
Could be. I can't find anything on it.

Any reason I should expect these sizable, apparently
healthy plants to NOT do better than the ones I have
on order from a nursery for 2-3 times the price?

Well, they're probably grafted plants, probably on "Dr.
Huey" rootstock. Which rootstock may well be okay
for your area. The nursery plants you have on order
are probably grafted onto Dr. Huey as well, unless
it's a nursery specializing in own-root roses (as opposed
to, say, Wayside Gardens; heck, some varieties shipped by
Jackson and Perkins mail-order these days are own-root),
or it's in Florida and uses R. fortuniana as a rootstock (it
tolerates the climate and the nematodes.

(What boggled my mind and led me to my original post in
this thread was the classic old varieties that Wal-Mart was
offering, and that they seemed to be on their own roots [I
saw no sign of a graft union.])

They should be okay: nothing way special, but okay value
for money, and Tropicana and Chrysler Imperial have stood
the test of time. I prefer own-root roses (just yanked a sucker
off the base of my grafted Blanc Double de Coubert: time to
take cuttings and root them, if not long overdue) but Heaven
knows that the cheapness of mass-produced grafted ones has
led me to buy more than my share of those.

Mark.