When Dee at Red Dirt Ramblings posted about Rose Rosette disease a couple of times it caught my attention and made me wonder. I started looking closer and did some more reading. It didn't look good for the roses at the posh estate.
The wild multiflora rose is a dominant species in the forests of NC. The woods around the posh estate are choke full of them. I started looking closely at them and wasn't finding any symptoms. Then the lawn mower dude told me he read about a rose disease in the paper and had seen some weird looking wild roses on the property. He pointed them out. Oh crap! Rose Rosette was definitely present in the wild roses.
A large number of the cultivated roses at the posh estate are infected with Rose Rosette. There was no longer any doubt.
I had been watching a hillside of shrub roses looking like crap and slowly dying in a neighborhood on the opposite side of Waynesville all season.. Today I was next door and stopped to have a closer look. All the pictures here are from that one planting. They are in the advanced stages of Rose Rosette and are being decimated by the disease.
Rose Rosette disease is in Haywood County, NC big time. I doubt most people even know what it is at this point. This planting is well on its way to being dead. On another slope on this same property all the roses were already completely dead.
I have five clients in this neighborhood with roses in their gardens. I have very bad news for them. I have worse news for the posh estate. They are already infected.
I'd say landscape roses are soon to be toast in these parts.
The sweet pea Cupani was enjoyable. Let's have another look at that. It survived a pretty intense aphid attack. I kept ignoring it. One day I saw a lady bug there. Two days later all the aphids were gone. A couple torrential downpours may have helped too.
The hemlocks are gone. Roses may soon follow. It's a bit scary, but gardeners will adapt. The gardening must go on.
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