| The main rose we grow for drying is Sarah Van Fleet, a 1920's rugosa hybrid. We generally pick in the tight bud stange. It's a big plant, starts blooming very early and practically never stops until after several frosts. We also pick a lot of The Fairy. It has small blooms, we pick them in clusters and use them mainly glue-gunned onto moss -covered straw wreaths. Similar but less prolific are some old polyanthas -- Margo Klostner and Mothersday. Another favorite is Raubritter, a 1930-ish Kordes introduction that has long, thin, winding canes that tend to snake close to the ground. It gets small, cup-shaped flowers (no scent) with a great "old-fashioned' look to them. I think it's classified as a R. macrantha hybrid. It's available from a few old-rose specialists. I got our bushes from Hortico in Canada. We've dried the flowers of Reine de Violettes and Mme. Isaac Peirre on screens. They make nice medallions in the end, but they shrink a lot. Other roses that we sometimes dry, usually as buds or just beginning to open are New Dawn, Mme. Alfred Carriere and Fruhlingsgold, another Kordesii shrub. We dry a variety of old roses for potpourri -- mainly the apothecary's rose, but also some centifolias (Fantin Latour) damasks and albas (Maiden's Blush). With roses that bloom in clusters, we pick stems with several blooms and place them over wires that we've got running back and forth along the sides and roof of the loft in the barn. For other roses -- buds, large blooms and petals for potpourri, we use horizontal screens. The basic screening material is 1/2 inch hardware cloth. If we're drying a large bloom or semi-opened bud, we'll stick the stem through the cloth to hold the flower upright. For potpourri, we add a layer of fiberflass screen on top of the hardware cloth so that smaller petals won't fall through when they're dried. We also grow some roses for their hips -- R. rubiginosa (eglantine, sweetbrier), R. glauca and R. canina (dog rose). | 
