Nice to see a few older Austins on there as well. Lordly Oberon is an Austin I've always wanted to get(Well I want them all really). Pretty Jessica seekers will see that she is offering PJ as well. I like how she has here own description and photos of each rose as well.

She has a beautiful site and her roses are so lovely.

Yes, Nick and Ramblinrosez! she has such lovely roses and she is truly a lovely lady!

Her price is FANTASTIC too! Usually I get my order placed a year in advance, because there's 2 advantages: to make sure that the rose will be in stock for the rarer ones, and the choicest roses gets to flourish in her climate instead of having to weather a winter like my brutal 2009 winter. And when the rose is ready to ship out, she lets me know and I all I have to do is pay through PayPal when the rose is ready. Crepuscule was the exception (I added it only 2 weeks before the shipment date when I found out that my rabbit-eaten Special Occasion was dying), whereas Viking Queen I put in reserve late fall. And Linda will help choose which is the biggest plant that is ready to be shipped too!

I went ahead and placed my order for Ferdinand Pichard for 2011! I can't wait for Ferdy!

I just got a small order from her :) :)

Really great sizes for the price and low shipping! I'm so glad to have found this nursery.

They look very healthy, too.

Can you tell us about the size of the plants she sends out?

Centerum, so sorry, I just caught your question on my thread. My baby band is 1' tall + (not including the bud). When I received it, it was an inch shorter on one of its canes and 2" shorter on the other, but! Those two gorgeous basal canes were fully leafed out! One cane was single branched and sported the bud, the other basal cane has two really well developed branches (six stems per branch with the full sets of leaves on!). If this band did not have that large bud on it, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have been 1'1" on both canes, not just one cane. The flower bud is 3/4" and is very dense and heavy. I always use a tape measure.

I owe Florence a huge thanks too for her inspiring Viking Queen or else I would never have found Long Ago Roses or have had such a beautiful rose. It is the band that I am totally in love with, not a day goes by that I don't rush over to see it, just to put a smile back on my face. Crepuscule is very healthy and sending out new leaf shoots very faithfully too but it has one cane and was not ordered in advance- it was a rushed order that was just barely started in 2010. Linda is shy about the size being only 8" when I got it, but I am very satisfied with it. According to HMF and Peter Beales forumers, Crepuscule is supposed to be very sloooow to mature, but mine is taking off as if it were any regular rose!

Linda does not have a greenhouse-she is located in the mountains of Appalachia, so when you order in advance, you will get a WINNER of a band that has survived winter on its own. Some roses she has in stock and have been growing in 2009, so she may be able to send those. But some are more rarely ordered (my Ferdy is one of those) so she is starting cuttings for that this spring. But winter is also a wonderful tester of viable great bands so I will always reserve a rose way in advance. All you have to do is pay when the rose is ready. Linda responds to questions right away. She hopes someday she will be able to have a greenhouse, so here's a cheers to her and that our roses will help her get that greenhouse someday! :)

My three were all around the 1 ft range and sturdy :) I wanted them ASAP, so she emailed me with the sizes she had of the cultivars I wanted. So awesome.

I am truly interested in the roots, not the blooms. I got plants this year with great top growth and even blooms on them that had very weak roots and the only rose I planted in the ground died very soon - it was sold as a one gallon rose. Well....(I traded roses but usually exchanged ours when the roots were more substantial.) So, I am in the process of seeking out new vendors who would not dare send out plants like that.

I saw the photos of the bands that someone got from Rouge Valley and those were impressive but the shipping from that company was a killer last time I checked. Maybe I should check again.

However, a vendor closer to me has even more attraction. Lower shipping cost is a plus and she should be familiar with our growing condition even though inland is different from the coastal climate. I will check out her list and contact her if I see something that interest me.

Thank you for your answer, I appreciate it.

umm, I am confused by RVRs website. I am thinking that there is no way, a baby band can be in a 5 gallon or 2 gallon pot. That's more like a regular young own-root, similar to what Roses Unlimited sells. In my humble opinion, it is very difficult for me to imagine getting heavy top growth from true actual baby bands. Baby bands stay very delicate in proportion to their size because they've been raised straight from cuttings and are less than a year old. An older baby band may be larger because it sat around unbought, but I would say it's pretty rare to get a top heavy baby band, in my humble opinion? Or am I just confused?

But I do want to stress that Linda at Long Ago Roses does not have a greenhouse to coddle her bands. A weak band with weak roots is not going to survive winter. And no puny weak root system is going to be able to support two basal canes like my Viking Queen band. So do I have confidence in a great root system with my baby bands? ABSOLUTELY! You are right in that size of leaves and blooms never indicate a band's health, but what does give a sign is how fast does this band send up brand new growth and what is the texture and coloration of that new growth. All my baby bands leaves were in direct proportion to the girth of their canes so that indicates that the bands were not over-fertilized and manipulated into sending premature growth. In other words they are genuinely healthy bands with a good root system.

Another thing you might consider is that baby bands do better pre-potted or cushioned with an "insulation" of potting mix because the potting mix is similar to the soil used in a nursery and it is easier for the roots to push through the potting mix as opposed to clumpy native soils. That way the roots have time to gradually adjust as rain and earthworms gradually seep in the native soil into the potting soil. Plus when the roots are strong and vital they will naturally push their own roots outwards into the native soil when they are good and ready. Sometimes native soils can be too harsh for certain baby bands and baby perennials. I've never lost a baby band from initiating them into my garden, but I did lose weak baby perennials (1/2"-2" in size from American Meadows) when I tried to plant them directly into my native soil without using potting mix as a buffer. All baby perennials that were insulated survived. My other perennial company Bluestone Meadows had very healthy root systems and were much larger, so I didn't need to worry about cushioning them with potting mix, but the ones that I did decide to "pamper" just took off like crazy, whereas the non-cushioned ones took longer to establish themselves.

Could somebody answer a very dumb tech question for me about Long Ago Roses? I went to their site to look at the list of roses. When I clicked on it, I came up with an "mht" file. I don't know what this format is. When I try to look at it, its a huge file of html code. Could somebody tell me what application (on a Mac) to use to look at their list? Thanks!

Frances, this is not a dumb techy question at all! Sadly, .mht cannot be read by Safari. Only Windows Users can see it.

On the other hand Opera 9.0 can read .mht files once it converts the file to an .mhtml file.

There is always a battle between web design and different browsers. I have a huge headache battling this because I do web design. Doing web design drives me crazy because there are so many bugs and compatibility issues.

The other thing is do you have Microsoft Word in any of your application programs? If so, you can try to save it as an mhtml document to your hard drive and Microsoft will open and read it for you.

Finally, if you are still stuck, just email me by clicking my profile info and I will convert the file for you to something readable like an Adobe .pdf

Thanks Serena! That is so sweet of you to offer to convert the file for me. I have Neo Office, tried using that but it didn't seem to work. My next step will be to ask DH (who DOES have Word on his PC) to get the files for me. I'll let you know - thanks so much!

Wonderful Frances! Frances way back I used to be Apple person but once I got into 3D animation, I went straight to PC. I do know that all Adobe products are cross-platform compatible. I take it that your husband's PC is at work and not at home or on a laptop where you can easily view it, so if worse comes to worse I will definitely try to do an Adobe Acrobat file conversion or one of my software conversions. Just let me know if you're still stuck.

On a completely different topic, first time I started this thread, I wrote that I'd show a photo of Viking Queen. But now Crepuscule is starting to be as impressive as VQ, but without the bloom. I am amazed that a rose that is rated "slow to establish" is not acting slow at all.

O.K. here was the original 1'1" Viking Queen, I couldn't fit the rose in a closeup shot so I lost all the height in the foreshortened angle. You can't tell it's 1'1" not including the bloom, but that was the size it was at the time of the photo. It has now stuffed with brand new additional stems and its second basal cane is 2/3rds the length of its other basal cane (the one with the bloom on it. Not having that bloom to support anymore is giving it another spurt of growth.