Thank you all for sharing your experiences with Buck roses and enticing me to other varieties. You, evil rose people, you! I am very pleased to hear about PS. As I mentioned, it was an impulse buy and never thought about it or never paid any attention to it. I was so fascinated with the large 4 inch bloom with intoxicatingly sweet fragrance. The bush was in a 2 gallon container and about 1 ft tall. When I go back to the nursery and see the roses, I have a better idea about how they are. My garden contains some Buck roses also - Carefree Beauty, Earth Song, Aunt Honey, and Blue Skies. All the roses are indeed carefree except BS. BS had very strong citrus fragrance and acted like HT, but he decided to not grow.

Lucy, We were thinking alike once again. My DD and I were stuck in Austin traffic and the sunset was just spectacular so I took some pictures of it from the car also. Can you believe we were taking pictures at the same time at the same sunset. But I had the advantage of using both hands since I was a passenger. LOL Glad I was on the west side of the car. My obstacles were cars in the other lanes getting in the way of the view. My camera didn't capture the beauty of the pinks, oranges, magenta against the crystal blue sky so use your imaginations.

mehearty, I can't say one way or the other about the JBs, as so far I have only noticed a handful in my yard the last 2 years. Hope it stays that way! GGG, I will have to check over there and see what they say. I would not want to be the one to "lead you astray"! Annette, they have some thorns, but not nearly as bad as some of my other roses. Yesteray and last night was really telling. We had rain all day, a nice soaking rain. But then about 5 PM the sky got so dark the solar garden lights came on and so did out dusk to dawn light. Then the rain and wind came. The rain was literally in sheets. There were tree leaves all over the lawn from the wind. It lasted about 10-15 minutes at the most and we got over a 1/4 inch of rain in that time. Tonight when I went out and looked at SS she was looking almost the same as last night when I took the picture. More buds had opened today and some spent bloom petals were on the ground but the bush had pretty much held it's shape. Many of my other bushes were really drooping tonight.

The burned leaf tips and margins arte usually attributable to a drought response, triggered by over-watering, a high level of salts in the soil, and sometimes but not often - under-watering. The 2/3:1/3 you mentioned doesn't hold as much water as it would if you'd left the perlite out, but the ht of the perched water is the same with or w/o the perlite. This means there is a soggy layer of soil (100% saturated) at the bottom of the pot after you water. If you're watering when only the top inch or so is saturated, you're watering while the bottom of the pot is still saturated. This kills roots and causes lots of physiological problems related to drought stress and impaired metabolism- so the first thing I'd concentrate on is root health. Put directly, you simply can't have a healthy plant unless it's on a healthy root system. Wilting is an indication of drought stress, and not a particularly desirable condition for the plant. Still, it can be employed as a useful gauge re how long the plant CAN go between waterings. The occasional slight wilt is a stress, but it's preferable to the extreme stress of a forever soggy rhizosphere. Note the day you water and the day you see wilt. Count the days & start watering a day or two before you expect the plant to wilt. A sharpened wood dowel or skewer stuck deep into the pot is an excellent way to test for how wet/dry your plants are, too. BTW - not sure where you live, but when temps allow, your plant would much rather be outdoors. Al