Question
I dont have any of that information sorry.  I'm asking this question for my mom.  She has a few rose bushes that has I guess goine back to their wild roots.  They used to be yellow, i think one was pink and one was orange.  They are now all red.  She wanted to know why they have gone back to their wild roots.  If you could help that would be great.  Thank You!

Answer
Wild roots - also called "root stock" - are simply a fact of life among those of us who grow roses.

Science has done some wonderful things for us gardeners, Terri. One of those things has been to make it possible to grow Roses where no Rose has grown before.

That's right.

By chopping off the top of a very tough, but not so pretty, Rose bush, and gluing a pretty Rose bush on top of it, Science has invented Grafted Roses - Gorgeous and sometimes Hardy as well.

"Hardy" to a gardener does not mean "Strong".  It means capable of handling freezing weather and things like snow - more or less.  Your Mother's beloved Roses were one of those Scientific Miracles.  A skilled gardener glued ("grafted") the yellow, the pink and the orange Rose tops to strong, hardy roots so that you Mother could grow them where you live.  Without those special roots, those pretty Roses would be annual flowers in your neck of the woods.

Sometimes the roots start to sprout canes.  Sometimes these canes bloom.  But because they are unwanted, they have a special name: Suckers.

They divert energy from the pretty Roses.  So we remove them.  Often they never bloom.  

Roses grown as "own-root stock" are not glued to the roots of other Roses.  But as a result, these pretty Roses do not make it past 1, 2 or if you're lucky 3 seasons.  A cold winter, a bad freeze at the wrong time, late fertilizing -- a lot of things can fatally damage the upper Roses.  When people know how, they sometimes go to great lengths to keep their Rose bushes safe from the cold, mulching heavily and wrapping with burlap, anything to keep the Rose alive for another flush of blooms.

Your Mother may like the root stock Roses - some of them are grown for their own blooms, although they are almost always vastly different from the Rose that was lost.

The life of a Rose lover is filled with surprises and sadness.