The Rose of Life

When we first moved into the house in 1997 I planted a yellow rose bush since I had spent a year in Texas and the "Yellow Rose of Texas" was one of my favorite songs when I was younger. Roses love the Georgia clay. All you have to do is dig a hole, place the rose bush in it and it will grow. This is a photo of the yellow rose bush.

The yellow rose bush lived for two years but was killed by a bad freeze in 1999. The entire root ball was dug up and discarded.

The following year I noticed that we had two new little rose bushes springing forth from the ground. Had I not dug up the entire root ball the previous year?

To my surprise neither of the two little rose bushes turned out to be rose bushes but rather climbing roses. And neither of the roses were yellow. They were both crimson red. But that was just for the first year. Each following year the roses are both a different color, sometimes pink, sometimes fuchsia, sometimes almost red and sometimes with different color centers

If you can explain to me just how a rose bush can die, be dug up completely and then reemerge the following year as two completely different types of roses I would love to hear your answer.

Now if you can answer that question then you may be able to explain this situation: I planted eight crimson climbing roses against the back fence. For several years all flourished and all were a brilliant crimson in color and all started climbing the back fence. But the year after the yellow rose bush died one of the red crimson climbing roses along the back fence decided to start changing colors. It went from crimson red to pink and then to an almost orange color. The colors were different each year. It also quit being a climbing rose and became a rose bush.

As you can see by this picture the rose color for 2008 is a deep crimson (click to enlarge)