I'm not a great fan of grocery store roses but I'll give you my two cents worth. Since it was almost dead and you saved it in the nic of time it is in a very weak condition. It will need some time to recover and to have more blooms. Sometimes it helps to cut off the dead blooms to encourge new growth/new blooms but not always. Growing roses inside is not recommended. They need more light than that but when you take it outside you'll need to gradually introduce it to full sun. Roses do best with several hours of full sun a day. Another drawback of growing roses inside it they have a tendency of getting spidermites! I've never read the directions for saving a grocery store rose but I grow a lot of miniature roses and I don't see the harm in not seperating them...but I've no first hand knowledge here.

If you are REALLY interested in growing miniature roses you might want to go to some of the vendors mentioned on this forum by other people.

If you have any more questions you can e-mail me because I don't check this forum very often.

Good luck, and have fun!
Laura

Miniature roses are not happy indoors unless you have added lighting. They are garden plants. That is why they often look horrid in grocery stores/big box stores because they have them indoors, they go from a full sunlight greenhouse to a dark store. They are often not properly watered (please don't blame the clerks, blame management, clerks often know they need watering but are not given enough time to get it done in addition to everything else) Then people buy the cute little plants and stick them on their windowsills.

They really should go outside, but slowly so they don't sunburn although they can often fully recover from defoliating and/or sunburn.

They are recomended to be separated because each one can grow to at least 18" by 18" in size and with 4 or 6 all crammed together the chances of fungus diseases and pot bound roots are greatly increased.

The "separating" refers to those pots that might have more than one plant in the pot. Own-root minis are propagated by cuttings, and some of the producers put more than one cutting into a pot. If those cuttings each rooted, then you'll have more than one plant in the pot. Hence the "separation". You'll only know if there is more than one plant in the pot if you take it out of the pot and rinse the soil off the the roots. If the plant is OK as it is, then don't bother with separating.

You do want to cut off the old blooms (deadheading) to encourage the growth of the new stems (canes), that's where the new buds will appear.

The bloom color sound like it is just standard for that variety. Many roses have blooms that change colors as they age.

I know this is an old topic, but one reason for not growing minis in the house is the roots. My in ground minis have roots over 6'long. So trying to grow them in a pot, they will get rootbound in no time. Then you'd just have to keep changing pot size. That's a lot of work!