Help with identification

Hi all. Here's a post i've been wanting to do for a few weeks. A little over 3 weeks ago i inherited 4 roses from my daughter. She asked me to do something with them as they were very sick and smothered in blackspot. As she lives only about 10km away, i went there one day with the intention of transplanting them into pots. After seeing them i decided to leave what foliage was on them and just dig them out. I tried to be as careful as i could but know there was obviously some root damage. I found the soil there had a funny smell like it was "off". The roots were black instead of the usual healthy colour. I dropped each rootball into a bucket, wet it down and brought it home where i totally washed all the soil from the roots and then planted them in pots. I'm guessing, but going by the size of the base of the plant, they must be at least a few years old but the actual roses were no higher than 400mm. Maybe the daughter had tried to prune them back hard ?? She informed me they were David Austin roses and they were the last 4 to survive, the rest having gone to the big compost heap in the sky !! All of them were covered in BS so i cut all this away. As you can see by the accompaning photos, they are looking quite healthy now. I couldn't believe how quick they have come back from the brink of death. They are also budding up and producing their first flowers. The photos show 2 roses. One flower is not quite open but hopefully identification may be possible. For the purpose i will call the photos "Rose A" and "Rose B".

Rose A
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Rose A
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Rose A
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Rose B
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Rose B
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They sure do look beautifully healthy Dave, you've done a good job! Can I send all mine to you too?? LOL
Rose A might be Mary Rose, but there are a lot of pink DAs, all yummy of course!
Rose B needs to open a little more for ID.

Hi Val. I was very suprised these roses came back so quickly. If you could have seen them about 3 or 4 weeks ago i would have said they didn't have a chance !! They responded almost immediately to a bit of TLC and i'm really impressed. Given that i completely washed all the old soil from their roots and potted them, i think they have done really well. Rose "B" should be fully open tomorrow i hope, so i shall take further photos of it. Even tho the roses now belong to me, i kinda wanted to identify them for my daughter as she was very upset to lose quite a few and to see these four roses survive and do so well and even bloom so quick has made her very happy !!

Youve certainly got the touch Wedge.
Rose A..hmm maybe Heritage? Mines not quite as dark tho *shrug* sorry Im not good at ID but youve definitely shown DA's can be grown well up north!

Good morning Ripley. Yes, you could be right also. I looked it up on Help Me Find and it looks very similar. It says that it's thornless or almost thornless. Although it has thorns, it doesn't have a huge amount like some of the other DA roses in the pots next to it. Even if i can't identify these 4 roses, they sure are pretty aren't they !! I've come to learn that the first lot of flowers on a rose may not necessarily look like the second flush and so on. I have Many Happy Returns ground cover here and some time ago i posted a story about them. When it started flowering, the flower looked nothing like what i was seeing on the tag that came with the rose and what i could also see on Help Me Find etc. It's 2nd flush of blooms looked more like it, so maybe it will be the same with these DA's. Having said that, i'm sure these particular roses have flowered before when they belonged to my daughter as they are at least 2 years old. As these 4 roses start flowering, i'll add more photos to this post.

I don't think it is 'Heritage' as 'Heritage' has a very distinctive pink... shell pink. I'm going to call the second one as 'Abraham Darby'. Are you sure they are both DA roses? I don't think the first one is 'Mary Rose' either. The flower doesn't match either my 'Mary Rose' or my 'Heritage'. Neither does the foliage.

Simon, as there was no tags on the roses, all i can go on with my limited experience is that my daughter told me she bought them as David Austin roses some time ago. They cost her quite a bit i think !! Talking about tags, i learnt a valuable lesson the other day. My climber, Papa Meilland, has been growing like it's got a bee up it's bum but only had 3 canes tho. I reported in another post that hopefully it would send out more canes some time in the future. Well, the other day it did just that. A lovely healthy shoot appeared just above the graft and it grew like crazy. The next day i had a look and all was good. That arvo i went to have another look and i found that the shoot had grown so fast during the day that it had got tangled up in the rotten tag they placed around the rose when i bought it. It bent the shoot back 180deg and snapped it off...all in a matter of about 12hrs. Hopefully it will grow more but now that i have little signs made up that poke into the ground with the rose's name on it, i'm removing all the tags that came with my roses !!!!