Hardy Roses
Hardy Roses are needed for Cold Climates
Many times people that live in colder climates with hard winters have given up on growing roses because they are unaware of the existence of hardy roses. The majority of roses are bred to grow in warm temperatures and cannot withstand cold and snow. There are, however, some select kinds of hardy roses that have been bred to withstand harsh winters.
One of the questions to ask when buying your roses is whether or not the plants are “own root” or not. That’s because plants that started out as grafted or budded may revert to one of the root stocks after winter kill and you will not end up with the rose you desire. Own root plants will come back in the spring exactly as when you planted them. Another consideration is whether or not the rose blooms on new wood or if it blooms on buds that were begun the previous summer on old wood. The chances are good that if they bloom on old wood, the roses will not make it through the winter. So, always get rose plants that have new growth on new wood every year.
Most of the plants that you see online and in catalogs are modern roses, meaning that they are hybrids that don’t usually adapt to cold climates. You could plant them in the spring and they would grow through the summer, but never survive cold winter temperatures. So if you live in New England or the Rockies or many other cold areas, these are not the roses for you. They include the hybrid teas, grand floras, climbers, floribundas, and miniatures. A couple of other moderns, shrub and rugosa roses are hardy roses and will live through cold and snowy winters.
There are two groups of roses that work well in very cold climates. The first are in the group called Old Garden roses. These were developed before 1867 and are more disease resistant and hardy than the newer cultivars. Among these, halbas, damasks, gallicas and centifolias are hardy roses.
Also among hardy roses that will survive cold winters are some that were bred in Canada. These include Explorers, named after Canadian explorers and bred at an Ottawa experiment station, and the Parkland Series, which was developed at the Morden Experiment Station in western Canada and which have names with “Morden” in the title. Most of the roses in these groups adapt well to cold environments.
The University of Vermont Horticulture Research Center is testing hardy roses, as the area gets down to twenty below zero and beyond in the winter. The Canadian Explorer roses did well there as did shrubs and rugosa roses. Rugosas are extremely hardy roses as they survive all kinds of stress that roses normally can’t take. This includes salt from winter roads.