Hi SugarChile,

Hello Wong, I have been enjoying your posts and your contributions.

Thanks for your encouragement, I realy appreciate this. :-)

Recently I was depress and told myself I should keep quiet and go back
to work. Yesterday I saw your post but don't know how to reply, but
it do encourage me to do other posting.

We have very high humidity here for extended periods in the summer,
and many
rose varieties, even the resistant ones, fall prey to blackspot.

Here I stay are tropical area, we can prune at all time. In this case
I will remove all branches with blackspot up to the crown, even this
will make the rose branchless. The new branches come out after this
will be OK. If we do this early, we do avoid the need of making the
rose branchless.

Remove(thinning) old branches from time to time will help to avoid a
lot of problem in my experience. Normally I will remove the new shoot
from a branch after it give flower to stop the branch continua
growing, and remove the branch when the existing leave change to a
colour that indicate it's too old to function properly.


We also
have a lot of Japanese beetles, which seem to favor roses above all
else.

I think the plant will develop it own defend if we let it go on after
a few regrow. This work for me. But we need to prune it for help
balance the food it make and the food it useup. Sometime we may need
to remove all buds to stop the new grow/flower for a while to
accumulate the food to help it survive.

There are so many beautiful and wonderful things I can grow without
intensive care, that I decided to forgo roses and enjoy the ones my
neighbors grow.

I do this as well. If the species does not work well at my land, I
just look for another species. But if I really need it, I will try to
develop my old ecotype.

Your grandmother's rose sounds wonderful, and I'm glad you were able
to help
it thrive,

I do propagate it with the cutting I get when pruneing, and remove
those does not grow well. I hope this will help to develop a ecotype
that live better at my land.

Thanks,
Wong

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Latitude: 06.10N Longitude: 102.17E Altitude: 5m