[Carolyn (OP)]

When we built our house we planted an ordinary purple rose bush next our deck in our back yard.  Our house caught on fire and the rose bush was burned up.  It came back the next year and we dug it up and moved it to our front yard. It's no longer a regular rose bush, now it's a climbing rose and has turned red! 

How can it change?

[Karen W.]

Just a guess but I would assume the soil where you transplanted it to, is higher or lower in certain minerals where it is now.. and perhaps more or less acidic or alcoline soil. I have often heard that iron or other metals planted or placed in the soil can change the color of flowers also.. A hydranga changes to a blue if you plant something iron in the grond around its roots..

perhaps something like that is envolved.. even ash may have changed things. perhaps it needs an iron rod forr colorand support.. and to retrain its lower limbs th thicken up growth again...

[another_someone]

When I was a naughty little boy (well, a naughty little teenager), one day when walking to school, I poured some ammonia over some roses in someone's front garden.  Next morning, walking past the same front garden, where I could have sworn I saw red roses growing the previous day, I now saw only white roses.

Many years later, listing to a gardening program on the radio, I heard that ammonia was a standard method for changing red roses to white roses.

I suspect analogous changes in soil condition have changed the colour in your roses.

[Carolyn (OP)]

Thanks Karen & George, makes perfect sense.  We have had the rose in the front for several years now.  I've been staking it up since we moved it.  I too thought the lower limbs needed time to grow and thicken up, but I'm sure it's a climber now. The problem is where I have it planted a trellis wouldn't look good, so I'll have to move it, but I'm not sure when the right time to transplant is.

Someone suggested that the change in the plant could have something to do with grafting and when it was burned it burned past the graft and what grew back was the original rose plant.  What do you think? 


George....I can't imagine you being that naughty!  Shame on you!

[DoctorBeaver]

When I was but a wee kit we had a lot of standard roses in our garden. Sometimes a "runner" would appear, having sprouted from 1 of these rose trees and travelled underground to poke up its little green head elsewhere. If left to flourish, these runners would grow into rambling roses.

[Carol-A]

Any shoots off cultivated roses will be wild ramblers, and they are much more hardy than the original rose. The rootstock surviving after a fire is more likely to be of the wild rambler than the original cultivar!

[DoctorBeaver]

I once poked a rambler in the eye. That made him pretty wild.  []