When the decision was made to close the nursery and dig up most of the thousands of roses in the garden, we then spent well over a year sending out to our mailing list constantly updated inventories of roses available to be dug up, bare rooted, packed and shipped. Many of these were large plants and my overriding objective was to ensure that as many of these roses as possible found good homes in gardens across the country. This required employing a crew full time for what proved to be very time and labor intensive work. We charged actual shipping costs and an amount of each rose that allowed us to approach break even and pay the crew over this extended period of time. I can assure you that there was no profit built in whatsoever, but gave me the satisfaction that the great majority of this collection of mostly rare roses, which were originally imported from Europe, would continue to be grown in a wide variety of gardens.

You may be right about this, Stefan. However, I'm not sure why your comment came to me.

Cliff