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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;dougsmit, post: 3000027, member: 19463&quot;]Modern roses (and horses, dogs, grain bananas etc. etc.) are the result of a thousand years of mankind playing with genetics to make living things &#039;better&#039; by their definition.&nbsp; There are rose hedges and flowers that come from root stock below the graft that might seem closer to what the ancients saw in their world but most of them are far beyond what started the species way back when.&nbsp; I have a friend who runs a business selling apple trees of the varieties that grew in Virginia 200 years ago.&nbsp; Many of his varieties taste great but bruise so easily that they could not survive a trip to a chain grocery or might be expected to have a few bruises that I was told would not hurt me to eat when I was a kid but would never sell at Kroger.&nbsp;&nbsp; I know dogs as large as some horses shown on coins and a dozen other example of our playing with mother nature.&nbsp; </p><p>I was born in New Castle, Indiana, home of the special rose greenhouses that produced long stem flowers carried by Beauty Pagent winners.&nbsp; Many of the buildings were destroyed by tornados before I was born but we used to play ball in fields next to the ruins of a time when a rose needed stems longer than the girl who was carrying them.&nbsp; The flowers were susceptible to many diseases and kept poorly.&nbsp; By the 1950&#039;s few existed and Rose City was no more.&nbsp; I suspect the roses in Rhodes were a bit past what nature invented and what grew in other places even then.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]742137[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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