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If it were possible to get grafted plants in band sizes do you think we'd see the same/similar failure rate? Is it often as simple as loosing a young plant that simply doesn't have the root mass to recover from defoliation (disease, pests, or animal) or other environmental stresses (winter, drought)? Of course there's still plenty of varieties that just need grafting for decent vigor, or for enough vigor to get them through their first cold zone winters.
Yup, I think there would be the same failure rate. The roots are the foundation of the plant. A rose with a healthy root mass has the tools to fight off whatever nature throws at it.
If you are gardening in less than ideal conditions, even a full sized budded plant is susceptible to failure. I have to grow a viable root mass for every rose I plant because the rose
needs those roots just to get going. It takes a rose several seasons before the roots are large enough to function well in my high summer temps and lousy soil.
a larger own-root plant will do well where a band-sized plant might fail.
In my garden, I could never plant a band directly into the ground. I hate container gardening up here, but I will do it to grow up a root mass.
grafted roses for areas when you know there's going to be root competition.
That's another given in this garden. If you are planting HTs or floribundas, their roots often lose to root competition. I have two exceptions, and I would use either of these roses as root stock IF I ever wanted to graft my own roses. The first is Kim Rupert's 'Lynnie' and the second is the Harkness rose 'Cardinal Hume'. So far, they have handled the root competition from the junipers as well or better than the grafted roses.
Zuzu ... I don't have gophers in this garden, although I have seen their mounds out in the forest. I think that is the ONLY advantage of gardening in rock ..
I like Kim's article about root stocks. He has used all of the root stocks mentioned in the article. I think that gives him a better "feel" about both the root stock and how well it takes the scions.
http://www.helpmefind.com/gard...
