Toni, for me there are two rose-planting time limits. For bare-root roses, they absolutely must be in the ground by the last day of March. Earlier is fine, but no later. Otherwise they dry out. Because they are dormant already, they can take their good old time to leaf out. And when they do leaf out, it will be with the kind of restraint that plants exercise when they are good and used to coolish nights. Even some grafted HT roses will survive in these conditions. I received Oranges and Lemons from S&W in February. It leafed out during April, and is now covered in purple foliage and bearing the expected flowers. Liebeszauber arrived then, too, and it is just beginning to set flowers, but it does look very healthy and vigorous. Folklore on multiflora roots is doing well in its second season here. Grand Dame from Edmunds proved evergreen this winter, and bloomed generously for the first time in its second year here. It was planted just before a March snowstorm last year, along with Firefighter and Leanne Rimes, also doing well.
Potted plants, on the other hand, arrive with leaves, usually. The ones from VG arrived with those especially bright, shiny new leaves that are not yet hardened off. In my experience, such plants cannot see 40F nights night after night lest they give up. I've tried planting them in April, and there is always a point at which the weather destroys them. If they do not die of frost outright, the chill makes them give up and they grow not a whit in their first season. By the next year the chance that they have received the right amount of water and have dodged being pulled up with weeds is practically nil. Chic arrived in late April last year as a band from RVR and it got hit with a 22F night. Most of the roses in that shipment died. Chic survived, but it grew not at all last year. This spring it has grown a full inch and is now seven inches tall, but it is quite subdued. By contrast, the roses from VG arrived second week in May this year growing like mad and are already making a second flush of flowers and foliage. I will have to cut back on their water in early September to harden them off, else I'm sure they won't be back next year; but they will have all gotten in a full season of vigorous growth, ending up the season in a materially different state than Chic. Delaying two weeks in delivery until mid-May will have gotten me a whole season's worth of growth! (Assuming I can keep the plants alive through winter.)
Porkpal, I'm gardening because it gives me an excuse to be outside when the weather is nice. And I'm enjoying it. I will freely admit that growing roses here is proving much more water-intensive than I had imagined. As I've said here before, I'm hoping to get a lot of roses well established, keep them mulched, and then spend more time hiking and lying in the hammock instead of weeding and watering. If I find that the roses persist in needing more care than I am willing to provide, they will die and be replaced with plants of easier care. The water bill last month was way bigger than I wanted, and I'm not doing that for many more years. I'm hoping it can be reduced as roses get established: I don't expect there to be another year when I plant 80+ roses and hand water them every day for four or five months straight.
Advice on how to taper down on watering roses without killing them or setting them back too far would be welcome! I'm thinking of cutting back watering frequency to five days in July, then to three days per week through August, assuming I get some mulch down and we get some monsoon rains. Then in September, maybe water twice per week. Finally, when frost hits, I'll not water until the ground is dry six inches down: that could be as early as February or as late as April. At that point I'll start ramping up again to four times per week for established roses. That's the plan, anyway.
