Too bad! But, you're right about marketing being important. It must be hard to sell a rose today named "America's Junior Miss". It sounds rather outdated and not particularly "p.c." either. Still, a rose must somehow stand on its own merits despite its name. I should have bought one while I had the chance.
It's just as I've always said -- it's the nurseries that propagate that determine what plants are available for sale. It never ceases to amaze me how plants come and go so quickly in the market -- sometimes because one major propagator makes a big run of a particular cultivar, and then doesn't again, and no one else takes it up.
It points out the importance, at least with roses, of supporting smaller, specialty nurseries that propagate plants. I don't get too picky about own-root or grafted, much less what it's grafted on, because I know many of the rose varieties found now are very thinly available. No point in being fussy -- take what you can find and be grateful that someone has gone to the trouble of making the plant available. And as you know, Robert, some plants are easy to propagate, others slow, tricky or downright impossible.
My real problem is I need more land to plant roses!
