You may want to try asking in the rose forum. They are full of good advice on roses. Good luck

Thanks. I will try there, but I was hoping someone more familiar with NE growing conditions might have some recommendations.

I'm not a rose specialist (I have only 4 or 5 kinds of roses), so you may get much better advice from others here or on the rose forum. I know nothing about the new, super-tough varieties, and one of those may be your best bet. However ...

I love fairy rose, and have one planted at the street. It's in good soil (I tilled in lots of compost when I built this bed) and I keep it mulched. This spring I cut it back from a whopping 9 feet wide down to about 3 feet, because it was overpowering a boxwood edge in the bed. It blooms for a very long time, very reliably.

While it's not self-cleaning, the flowers are small enough that they don't look too bad when they've gone by. Clusters are borne on the stem ends, making it simple to deadhead, which I do once, or possibly twice, in a season, most years - sometimes I just don't bother. Love, love, love this rose!

I don't have any roses right up to the road, but I do have one perennial bed that is bordered by the road on one side and I have a couple of roses there. I've used 'Julia Child' a yellow that has worked well for me and I garden organically without pesticides, so it has to be healthy and disease free, which mine has been. Mine is about 10 feet from the road.

In coastal areas of New England, you will often see Rugosa roses along the roads. Perhaps you could grow those? I know there are a lot of different varieties 'Blanc Double de Coubert' is the only one I'm familiar with and some new ones that have double blossoms and most of them are fragrant. They are supposed to be tough, I think.

If you go to the rose forum you will find there are a number of regulars there who are from New England.

One thing I would suggest you consider, is whether the area you want to put them, will end up with road salt or snow piled up from shoveling.

Depending on how big you want, I can come up with a rose or two to recommend. The problem is that I have some experience weeding under roses, and I'm not sure that is a good solution to the problem. Evergreens might be better, but if possible the best solution is usually to mow the area. Then you are dealing with lawn weeds like dandelion, chicory, and plantain. If you plant shrubs, you are dealing with woody weeds like maple and oak saplings, poison ivy, Virginia creeper and bittersweet.

Digging, thanks for the suggestion. I will take a look at the fairy rose.

Prairie moon, thanks for the suggestion of rugosa. Most of them are one-time spring bloomers, I think, and we're looking for something to provide color throughout the summer and into fall, if possible. Road salt and plowing are not issues.

Gallica, I wish we could mow this area. It slopes steeply down to a ditch and, because we're in the Granite State, is full of stones, rocks, and boulders. My husband has used his bushwhacker (or whatever it's called -- the thing that eats small trees) on it, but it just about put him in the hospital. My rechargeable weed trimmer is okay, but runs through a battery charge before even 1/10th of the space is done. My plan is to put down newspaper and cardboard and cover with mulch after planting each shrub. I hope this will control the weeds for a few years until the shrubs rill in and provide serious competition for the weeds.

I would be fine with rhododendrons, but my husband really wants the color to continue throughout the summer.

There are some Rugosa Roses on my parent's beach, and they seem to bloom a pretty long time. They also produce Rose hips for color also. They get zero maintenance at my parent's. Unfortunately they are considered invasive.

In principle I feel I should recommend the similar native plant Virginia Rose.

Holly has red berries that last into the winter, so in a way it has a longer season of color then anything.

You aren't thinking of the right magnitude of weed.

These are weeds.

IME, cardboard works for about a year. Then it is soft enough that the squirrels don't consider it a planting barrier, and may even like the softer soil underneath.

White pines, right, Gallica? I'm fighting those for sure! In fact, that's most of what the utility crew took out -- no great loss. I just wish they had left the birches and wild cherry and shagbark hickory and staghorn sumac and ....

Oh, it will be back. The hickory is the only one that should even take a while to get back to its full glory. Cherry and birch are both relatively short lived, and the sumac should already be making its presence known. The town my father grew up was surrounded by forests owned by timber companies. They would clear cut, then the forest would grow back so they could clear cut it again in 50 years. What you are dealing with sounds very familiar. It isn't planting a hedge in the backyard. It is jungle control.

The photo is of the Escarpment ridge in the Catskills. So it is mixed deciduous forest. I have white pine seedlings as weeds in my perennial beds, but they are easy to pull.