Are your roses suffering from disease?

If you have roses, I ask that you be on the lookout for a devastating disease called rose rosette.

This disease is a virus that is transmitted by the eriophyid mite.

The mite is so tiny that it would take a 40X hand lens to see it. It has a great ability to hitch a ride on the wind, thus spreading to other plants.

The mite does not cause much damage to the rose. However, as it feeds from plant to plant, it picks up the virus from one plant and spreads to the next.

The symptoms show up in the spring as the plant begins to leaf out.

During the growing season, these symptoms get much worse. By now, they are easy to spot.

One of the telltale symptoms is that the stems tend to have an abnormally large number of thorns and these thorns are sometimes larger and more robust than normal.

Another symptom of an infected plant is leaves that are chlorotic (yellowish) or red or both on the same shoot or stem. The stems are sometimes twisted or stunted.

The leaves may also be chlorotic or deep red or a combination of both colors, and may be twisted or smaller than normal leaves.

If the plant is really infected, it may not even look like a rose. Some might even mistake the appearance as damage caused by herbicide sprays.

The new stems or shoots just don’t look normal, like a healthy rose.

It is fairly easy to distinguish these symptoms if you are familiar with a healthy rose plant.

This virus has been around since the 1940s, however we haven’t seen much of it until recently.

We started hearing about it rearing its ugly head about five years ago.

I was in Texas a couple of years ago at the Fort Worth Arboretum and they had a rose garden that had been completely destroyed by rose rosette.

The horticulturist said that it took about five years for the damage to eliminate all of the plants in the rose garden.

The garden is still officially called the Rose Garden, but it’s now filled with hibiscus that bloom all summer long.

Unfortunately there is nothing that you can do about this disease.

If you discover it in your roses, remove the entire plant including roots and destroy.

As long as it remains in the garden, the disease can be transmitted.

In addition, multiflora roses are extremely susceptible to this virus and can be a major problem if they are anywhere near landscape roses.

Take a look around and remove these if you can.

Clean any tools that are used to remove the plants. This helps to reduce the spread of the eriophyid mite.