Our freshly harvested roses are barely beginning to open when we ship them. You will be able to enjoy seeing them open to their maturity and beauty.

We ship our products via UPS. Depending of your selection we ship Standard Overnight, ground or two days air.

Answer: The culprit is thrips. Thrips are tiny insects that suck on rose petals, turning the petals brown. You don't see this discoloration on red or pink roses, but it shows up clearly on white blooms. You have two choices: live with the discoloration or spray a mild insecticide directly into the bloom just before it opens. The thrips are not on the whole plant, so don't spray anywhere except into the center of the soon-to-open bloom. Each bloom gets one spritz of insecticide.

The proper tool for most pruning is a sharp clean set of bypass pruners. Anvil pruners should not be used for roses as they crush the stem being cut. A saw or lopping shears may be used to cut very large canes (1/2 inch diameter or greater) All pruning cuts on canes greater than 1/4 inch diameter should be sealed with nail polish or glue to prevent cane borers from entering. Proper pruning will help keep a rose bush healthy.

Most of our freshly harvested flowers are barely beginning to open when shipped. You will be able to enjoy seeing them open to their full maturity and beauty over the next few weeks. Our growers know their business and make sure club members get the absolute best!

I live in San Francisco, zone 9-10, depending on who you ask and which chart you consult, because even the city of San Francisco itself has micro-climates too. Anyhoo, I haven't been well the past several months and have completely neglected my backyard. What do you think? Is it ok to prune because the stems look awfully leggy? Is it too tardy? Is it never too tardy? Thank you.

All the bulk oils are packed in special aluminum bottles. To open these aluminum bottles take a pair of pliers and open the white plastic tab. Then there will be a clear plug with a ring. Don't use your fingers or pliers to pull the ring, gently use the pliers to remove the plug along the edge of the bottle, go slow and it is easy. You can re plug the bottle, but ultimately you want to pour your oil into glass bottles.

The Open Source Erlang Licence is essentially the Mozilla (Netscape) Public Licence with a few modifications to make it compatible with Swedish law. As far as I understand, this means you can obtain Erlang for free, use it to build cool systems and sell them without Ericsson coming around to charge you money. For an authoritative statement, you'll need a lawyer.

Answer: Almost all of the Rugosa roses are very fragrant -- and they're easy to grow. In addition to the Rugosa's the following roses are also fragrant: Cuthbert Grant and Rosa mundi. For more information about using the roses we offer, visit our online catalog. Answer: We have our favorites, of course, which biases this answer, but here's our suggested list for Zone 4: This list can be expanded, depending on your preference and favorites.

Answer: We get this question alot! I guess it's important to those of you giving roses as gifts -- you don't want it to send the wrong message! As far as we can determine, this is what the following rose colors signify: For more information on rose color, especially the names used to describe the color, visit the American Rose Society Web site.

It depends on where you live, and just how cold it gets there. In mild winter areas we generally recommend pruning back in the winter in January or February. In colder climates light pruning may be necessary to prepare you plants for cold weather insulation but the final pruning is done in the Spring after the danger of hard frost has past.

One of the most frequently asked and difficult questions to answer is how often and how much do I water my roses? On average roses need 1 to 2 inches of water every 7 to 10 days. That being said the best way to water is to develop a schedule for the specific conditions in your garden. Quantity and frequency are determined by soil texture, season, climate, exposure and the growth stage of your plants. Light (sandy) soils will need more water and frequent watering than heavy (clay) soils.

Definitely, fertilizer toxicity can have an adverse effect on your plants directly or may cause environmental damage. Major nutrients like nitrogen, potassium and sulfur in excess will cause marginal leaf burn. Excessive levels of phosphorus, calcium and iron will interfere with the availability of other nutrients. Minor nutrients like zinc, copper, and boron will cause leaf drop if over applied.

Bareroot roses are dormant plants sold without soil. Because roses are deciduous plants, they can be successfully field grown and harvested. This efficient method of mass producing roses allows the grower to produce high quality stock at much lower costs than container grown stock. Roses are harvested delivered and sold "bareroot" or without soil only during the winter season.

Deadheading is cutting off flowers as they wither or don't look as good. Old blooms left on the plant may have been pollinated and may begin to form seed pods (hips). The formation of hips requires a lot of energy from the plant and slows flower production. By preventing the formation of hips, deadheading encourages the rose bush to grow new flowers.

Though highly sought after, no blue roses exist yet. Some roses are advertised as blue, but they are actually lavender or something. Most lavender roses are difficult to grow and are quite susceptible to disease. Some of the bluer roses are Blue Girl, Blue Jay(HT), and Reine des Violettes(HP). A couple of true purple roses are Cardinal de Richelieu and Veilchenblau. The genetics are just not there for producing a true blue color in roses.

No true black roses exist. Some roses sold as black roses are actually dark red or maroon. The petals of many of these dark red roses tend to sunburn easily. To see that a rose is not truly black, hold it up next to a piece of black construction paper. To make a dark red rose appear blacker, put its stem in water that has black ink in it. Below is an incomplete list of some roses that have been mentioned when black roses are discussed.

There are two primary ways to propagate roses. Asexual reproduction is usually used to produce a duplicate of the parent plant. Sexual reproduction, i.e. growing roses from seed, is primarily used to create new varieties of roses. Common methods of asexual propagation of roses are softwood rooting, hardwood rooting, and bud grafting. Limited space permits only a brief description of softwood rooting.

Many Hybrid Musks and some Albas can tolerate partial shade. A few other varieties including the Floribunda "Gruss An Aachen" can be planted in partial shade. Some other roses that may grow in partial shade are the Rugosas, Iceberg(FB), Zephirine Drouhin (Bourbon), Souvenir du Docteur Jamain(HP) and Madame Plantier.

By putting them into the soil. Roses tend to prefer soil that is on the heavy side and soil that is not full of limestone or chalk. If you live in a place with less than a foot of rich soil on top of limestone or chalk, the roses will not do well. If you live where the soil is full of peat, David Austin advises chucking it and buying rose-growing soil. If you live in a place with poor, sandy soil then ammend it with 30% to 40% compost or rotted manure.

In addition to the rose sites listed in the links page there are a number of excellent books on roses. Some of them are listed below. Many of these references can be purchased on-line through Barnes & Noble at a substantial discount off of list price, but some are out of print and only available through the mail-order sources.

You can buy roses at a local garden center. Even Home Depot will have bare root roses at about the time of year when they can be planted in your area. The advantage to buying roses at a garden center is that you can determine exactly what color the foliage is. And if the rose is in bloom you can discover both the flower color and its fragrance.

Roses produce flowers that deer find completely irresistable. Those little bags of deer repellant - which work splendidly at keeping deer from eating a lot of things they don't care much for anyway - when hung six inches from a flower on rose Olympiad have proven to be of absolutely no use in preventing deer from eating the flowers once the petals have fully opened. Every single rose gets eaten just as it fully opens.

There are roses in literature but they do not smell as sweet. Here are some examples - although we seem to be having some trouble with our quotation references and can't get the attributions quite right.

Roman emperors had a fondness for rose petals. Nero, in his mile-long palace had rose petals dropped upon his dinner guests as they ate and reclined after dinner. There is even an apocryphal story about smothering them to death with rose petals. He was one of history's most notoriously bad rulers but he certainly had a flare for the dramatic.

The Wars of the Roses was fought between the years of 1455 to 1487 between the House of York and Lancaster. The name is derived from the badges utilized by the two sides: The red rose signifying the House of Lancaster, and the white rose signified the House of York. The conflict arose from the following points: