Thanks for checking with me Moses! Like many things with roses, my experiences with RRV have been a matter of managing rather than totally eliminating the problem.

For those of you unfamiliar with my recent RRV history, I had a massive pervasive spread of Rose Rosette in my garden that I detected too late. Our local public rose garden lost 90%+ of their roses to RRV the same year, and looking back it's possible that I could have conveyed that disease to my home garden after helping with the pruning. RRV expert Ann says that pruner or other mechanical transmission of RRV is slight however, so I don't know if the public garden timing was relevant. I combed my neighborhood to see if I could find a likely source and there really wasn't anything within a mile radius. Still, my garden was so infested with RRV that I ended up digging up all 850+ roses during 2022.

I left the garden fallow in 2023 and overwintered the new roses I'd bought in pots over that year. I have been planting roses again to refill those spots since then and I'm back over 1000 at this point. Yep, it's either dedicated or stupid, or both, but for me roses are the fun side of gardening, and gardening is an essential part of my life.

Back to Moses' question, I now am highly motivated and unfortunately highly experienced at recognizing RRV in my yard. I love the simple tips like "no larger canes should be growing out of smaller canes" that help me identify RRV and stop it before it gets established. I also love the successful reassurance of other knowledgeable gardeners that RRV travels down the cane in a progression and if you can catch it before it progresses you can stop the process in that rose. That means faithfully monitoring the ends of all my roses as I provide other maintenance, particularly the big roses and climbers that are more susceptible to catching those wind borne mites for RRV.

With that diligence, I've found clear indications of RRV at the tips of about 20 roses for sure, and another 20 that are maybes. Fortunately with cutting those canes down to the base as soon as I see it, and hair spraying the canes to bag and dispose, I haven't seen any recurrence on those affected roses. I now keep records of the roses for which I've seen one "strike" of RRV and if I ever get a second strike it's going to be dug out, however precious the rose. I'm to the point where this is such a relatively painless system that I cut back a cane if it looks suspicious because it doesn't hurt the rose and eases my mind.

What has been more troublesome and pervasive (and fatal) has been what I posted in another thread about what I now call "chlorotic ick", for lack of better identification. At largely random spots anywhere in the garden, I've seen roses have dramatically chlorotic foliage (outside of the usual chlorosis conditions) that are doomed to shrivel and die regardless of what I do once it gets started. Helpful contributors here on GW had suspected some new fertilizer from our rose society that might have trace elements clumped up but I've seen the effect on newly planted roses in 2026 that got no fertilizer, so that's not the primary or only cause I think. I'm still trying to get a soil test done but it's odd that one rose gets affected in the middle of perfectly healthy other roses, so it's not completely systemic. I dunno but I've lost at least 20 roses to chlorotic ick this year and several last year. I'll resurrect that thread if I get more information to share and ask for more theories of what this might be.

So the bottom line to your very thoughtful concern Moses is that in susceptible regions you're never done with monitoring for RRV. With watching for the signs and catching them early, there hasn't apparently been a spread that I can tell. A few roses are too tall for me to check the tips, and I'm going to have to take a ladder to check on the 10'+ monster canes of Peach Melba towering over an 8' arch to see if she's affected.

So far so good, and I'm finally enjoying a modest fall bloom on many roses as we're getting beyond the 90s here in LATE October - what is this? Halloween and 80 F with not a hint of frost warnings yet. Ah well, that's a topic for another time.

Cynthia

2026 was not a stellar rose season for me. A lot of spring rain followed by the shockingly rapid onset of high temperatures in the middle of May meant that my ‘summer’ heat and humidity and the consequent high disease pressures arrived far earlier than usual. Many roses defoliated and their first flush was poor with many blooms frying early. Scattered blooms were the norm thereafter and plenty just gave up and entered summer dormancy from which they struggled to wake from.

So it’s my last season of buying roses by the dozen too. In fact I’m doing the opposite, reducing them by the dozen. I am replacing many roses and herbaceous perennials that are now really struggling in increasingly brutally hot summers. Out go the unnecessary duplicates, those now exposed to too much direct sun (due to the death of a large tree that used to provide some shade), the diseased, the bloomless and the meh. The potted roses also need a serious edit because they are relentless in their water demands in my climate. Despite my unlimited well water, it’s becoming really difficult to keep everything sufficiently hydrated. Advancing age doesn’t help either.

Instead I am planting tough flowering shrubs, more shrubby salvias, euphorbias and other more drought-tolerant plants. I am having to face up the fact that a simpler, easier care and less water-hungry garden now suits me and probably potential buyers when I finally face up to the fact that I need to get serious about downsizing in the next year or two!