I never protect my clems in zone 5. I do sometimes lose some of them, but I'm pretty sure it's from something else, not cold. In fact, I thought I'd killed my Madame from not enough sun last year, but this spring, she popped up again! I love that about clems.

Sounds like a fun Mother's Day !! I just love c. Db! It's one of my favorites. Never thought about it with jackmanii ! Please share pics when it shows off !

I have a Jackmani that has been in a 1/2 barrel for probably 8 years and does wonderful. I live in middle Tn zone 7 a or b or something like that and mine seen temp's below several time this past winter and today its probably close to 10 feet tall and going strong.

Interesting... the last couple of years I covered the barrel with a tarp over winter and she did fine all year. Last winter I decided not to cover and I lost her. Don't figure...

I usually attribute losses to not enough sunlight during the summer. I seem to lose those that are in marginal areas. That being said, last winter was brutal for me - my 10' tall climbing roses are starting over from the ground, and I did lose 2 clems, both of which were pretty new to me, but others are going gangbusters, both new and old. I didn't think it was the cold, but I wonder whether, since yours were in a whiskey barrel, they got much colder than they would have in the ground. Didn't you also have a brutal winter this year?

ophelia, how did you prune out your climbing roses that you lost to the ground? I only ask because I had a Westerland rose that I also lost to ground level this year and wondered how you deal with pruning those? Prune to the ground? I am lucky in that Westerland was an own root rose so should come back after a long season or two.

A general rule of thumb for plants in above-ground containers is that they should be a couple of zones hardier than normal for your zone. Brushwood rates Madame Julia Correvon as zone 3 hardy, but if your winter included the abnormal cold that much of the midwest and Great Lakes states received, she may have gotten too cold for an unprotected pot.

Comtesse de Bouchard and Jackmanii are only zone 4 hardy so they may need more protection in your whiskey barrel than Madame Julia did.

I vow to protect them from now on! lol

I haven't pruned my climbing roses yet because I can't bear to think that they really are dead down to the ground. I keep looking for some sign of growth higher up, but there's nothing. Pretty soon, I'll have to, as they say, "put on my big girl panties" and go out there and start chopping. Denial is a powerful thing. I also have a beautiful, 6' tall Ispahan rose that seems to be coming back about 12" high. It's a once-bloomer that I'm pretty sure won't bloom this year at all. I find it painful to contemplate how many years it may take before these roses are back to their former glory. I'm hoping that with good root systems they'll take less time regaining their height than they took to make it in the first place.