Heya! I realized I never reported back -- and I really appreciated all the input & advice!
Here's what I ordered for my DMIL's garden:
1 "Red Intuition"
1 "Double Delight"
1 "Charles de Gaulle"
1 "Duftzauber 84"
1 "Valencia"
1 "Beverly"
1 "Zepherine Drouhin"
Since we weren't planning to be down again until Christmas (sometimes I can dig there during the holiday season, sometimes not!), Dad hired a guy (the person who provides the "muscle" for a local landscape designer) to plant them. When we arrived just before Christmas, I discovered that they had been spaced about a foot apart
and had their graft unions a couple inches *above* the ground.
(I emailed Dad the planting video link from Palatine and told him to make the guy watch it; guess that didn't happen LOL, and Mom just wasn't even up to supervising last fall.)
So... I called Palatine, and they were very helpful! Following their advice, I went ahead and replanted. Even the couple of plants that were placed in an OK position got replanted, because they weren't deep enough, and their roots hadn't been spread out. The roots on those roses were fabulous! I probably dug holes about 2 feet wide, and even so I barely got the roots spread a bit. (I pretty much pretended they were a non-rose bare root perennial, and then I felt like I knew what I was doing LOL.) They got moisture crystals and a little time-release fertilizer in their holes, and they got planted deep enough to cover the graft unions. Then I screwed my courage to the sticking point and pruned them back pretty hard. There's a soaker hose running between (I put that into their previous garden several years ago), so I know they'll get watered... Dad is good about that... and Mom established a schedule years ago for spraying/fertilizing the roses, I think, so he just does that. We told Mom her job would be to cut the flowers and bring them inside!
We probably won't be down that way again until June... those roses had better live AND bloom! Dad promised to take photos of them, both in the garden and in the vase.
