Maybe it’s just me, but the most difficult rose I’ve ever dealt with is the Double Delight.

It’s a very popular rose. The bloom is a beautifully white and pink and the perfume is strong and sweet, hence the name (rose pictured is not from my garden).

In Bakersfield, I found the plant was a little susceptible to powdery mildew — not much, but some, so I sprayed it. Every part of the plant hit by the spray became burned. I had leaves and canes dabbled with black. It survived, but it was ugly for half a season.

One of the first plants I bought last year, however, was a Double Delight.

Because Western New York is a more humid climate than Bakersfield, the powdery mildew problem last year was particularly difficult.

Three weeks ago, I started on a weekly spraying regime — insecticide, herbicide and liquid fertilizer — as recommended by the owner of Carey Lake.

I’ve had some leaves on the DD completely burn off.

I’ve also found that this plant, like the one in Bakersfield, really only produces useful cuttings — strong, leafy stems — early in its growing cycle. The next flush of flowers are on weaker stems with fewer leaves near the flower (which makes for a less attractive display).

But like I said, maybe it’s just me.

My search for what other rose growers were saying about Double Delight, turned up this forum, where most users rated the rose high and said it’s very easy to grow.

This comment, for example, contradicts everything I just said:

If you want a hybrid tea that doesn’t ever need spraying, even in my hot, humid, steamy climate I never spray, try Double Delight. Even when I had to in WAY too much shade it never got icky looking. It didn’t grow and it didn’t bloom much but it never got bad looking. Wonderful rose to look at, has an out of this world true “tea rose” scent and is easy on top of every…

But neither am I alone in my experience:

This is a cut Double Delight. It seems to be a bit tender. All three bushes got burned a little when i sprayed them with a light spray of Ultra-fine when nothing else got hurt. They did fine with Immunox though… and they did clean up well. The repeat, like most of my HT’s isnt as fast as i would like, but the first flush was great.

So I guess I need to find some Immunox.

This DVD looks interesting: Growing Good Roses

In a previous video, I showed you an area I had rototiled for a flower garden, but said it needed graded.

Two days ago, we had it graded. Here’s the video that shows you a bobcat in action:

The garden will be mostly roses, but we want to plant some Peonies, too. So I guess I’ll need this book at some point: Peonies (Firefly Gardener’s Guide)

I’ve just spent an enjoyable hour or so going through a web site I found for the first time tonight — Rosenut.

The home page opens with:

I am Karl Bapst, and I live in Northwest Indiana, Gardening Zone 5. My wife Nancy and I have been married since 1971. We have 6 children, all out of the nest. We have 21 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren. I survived a bout of acute leukemia in 1982 and am currently recovering from a massive stroke suffered in March of 2002.

I am a Life Member and a Master Rosarian> with the American Rose Society. I am also a Life Member of the National Home Gardening Club, an Advanced Master Gardener, and Master Composter through Purdue University, and member of the Duneland Rose Society of NW Indiana. I would welcome questions pertaining mainly to roses and composting but I have general knowledge of most other plants and access to answers to questions concerning many of them. I gave horticultural programs to various groups but have curtailed that somewhat.

Given my prejudice toward blogging, I wish Karl blogged … that said, for a personal web site dedicated to a hobby, Karl’s site is a great example of how to build an information-packed and interesting site. It’s also easy to navigate.

There’s just a ton of useful information for rose growers on Karl’s site — Karl answer’s questions, he shares his rose mix recipe, he has several short articles on rose care, he lists and reviews mail order suppliers, and he’s aggregated some great rose links. I’ve looked at a lot of rose sites over the past couple of years … Karl’s is by far my favorite.

My friends know I didn’t start growing roses until we moved to Bakersfield and bought a house that had 30 or so plants already in the garden. I needed to learn to take care of them, and that just got me very interested in roses.

Roses are very easy to grow in Bakersfield — great soil, lots of sun and dry weather … you would have to be a careless idiot not to be successful with a rose bush in Kern County.

Western New York — it’s a different story. There are more insects to deal with (most perniciously, the Japanese Beetle), mildew and black spot are more common and quicker to spread (the air is damper most days), and the soil (at least in my yard) is not as good.

That’s why there are not many rose gardens in Western New York (even though Jackson and Perkins was founded here). In the San Joaquin Valley, it’s hard to find a home without at least one rose bush in the yard. In Rochester, the favorite plant is lilac and roses go largely ignored.

That’s one reason I was so pleased to find out about Carey Lake last weekend.

I visited a nursery out that way because the owners used to live on my street (their former house is again for sale, and if you want to live in the Rochester area, it’s a lovely place — the landscaping is stunning). While visiting, I asked about roses and they said they pretty much don’t stock roses these days — nobody buys them.

But they did have one customer they do special orders for — the owner of Carey Lake, which is just three miles from the nursery.

So I drove down there to see his garden. It was way too early in the season to see any blooms, but he has an impressive formal layout for his garden. The owner was busy atop a large earth mover, pushing dirt into the lake (making some sort of peninsula or dock). He stopped when he saw me wondering through is garden and we spoke a bit.

He said he sprays his plants once a week with a mixture of herbicide, pesticide and fertilizer. He said, “You have to.” You can’t let the black spot get started, he said. For the beetle problem, he said he sprays each bloom every day with Sevin.

Photo gallery here.

Theses were good tips to pick up, which brings me back to Rosenut. I went online this evening to see if any rose grower had any recommended mixture for Carey Lake owner’s spray. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found Karl, and I’m glad I did.

The Rosenut recommends: Roses for Dummies