Millington's roses cannot be imported into the USA on account of some rose disease unknown to science. One wonders how anyone manages to grow roses at all in Oz.
Illicit narcotics pass through our borders with ease but God help the person who tries to import roses.
Bwahaha! Ain't it the truth. And because roses aren't 'important' enough, no one will ever do the research to show the USDA is out of their minds on this one. We can always hope, I suppose. If it got imported into Europe, and then someone tried to import it to the US, would it get hit with the same ban? Not that this would help any of us. I'm going to have to research this now. I do hope it's available in Australia at least.
As far as I understand it, Warren's roses are mostly being released in Belgium, not Oz, because the big rose nurseries in Oz are still focussed on high-centred HTs.
Which is funny (not haha) in that most of the population live in the major cities who's suburbs are being turned from 1/4 acre blocks into townhouse and granny flat estates, garden space is becoming much smaller than it was. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 to 20 years as the boomer generation decline and with space and desire to garden being lower in younger generations.
With difficulty if at all, I am afraid. Some years ago Vintage Gardens imported some rare cultivars from a famous rose garden in Italy--Italy it seems is also host to the dreaded disease--by way of a devious roundabout TInker to Evers to Chance route from Italy to another European country and from there to I believe the SF airport. Filroses regrets on its' website that it can no longer export to the USA and there were recounted on the gardenweb forum horror stories of roses from Europe being held up in customs till they died.
It is enough to make one consider deals with the devil, trips to Europe and special shipments to a confederate stateside, etc.
That's crazy. I wonder how this 'disease' came into being, and why they're so fixated on it. If they think it's so terrible it must affect other crops, and you'd think there'd be some research into it.
I think back in the day, when Jackson & Perkins was a successful and profitable company, it teamed up with Weeks and maybe others and bought a congressperson. Roses being a small crop, it would have been fairly easy to get import restrictions into a farm bill. The alleged disease was called lettuce wilt or something of the sort, as I recall. What lettuce might have to do with roses I cannot say.
Don't we wish. When one is dealing with the US Congress, money talks. Now, if everyone overseas who would like to import roses into the USA got together and put up some cash...maybe something could happen.
