Alana, glad to know she's doing well. I think many roses do like afternoon shade, but the Spray Cecile isn't as quick to fade as my bush form is, though it the hottest part of the year, the flowers do lose form & fade quickly. My relatives have that SC all over their yard--in an afternoon-shaded front bed, a full-sun side bed--& it seems to grow fine everywhere. A lady from Louisiana shared it with them as a housewarming gift when they first moved there in the late 50s.. That Spray Cecile has traveled around a lot! It's not as neat & pretty a plant as the tidy little bush form, but if you have room for it, it's an exuberant horse of a plant with very pretty flowers.
Straw, that's funny how the Darlow's did just fine in spite of not being treated in the traditional way! I'm starting to learn to be more flexible with cuttings--some root best in spring, others in summer (Fortuniana), others in Fall. And I need to get off the fixed idea of insisting on trying all cuttings in the same media--my most versatile media is #3 sandblasting sand with a bit of perlite, cuttings rooted in full sun, under mist. But, like Alana, this was an awful year for rooting for me--just rotten!--even things like Chinas & teas rotted on me & usually they're fail-proof.
I'm going to try some of the difficult ones in other medias--you're right, I think cuttings do need to have close contact with the media--whatever it is--to have any chance of success. Perlite may be great for drainage, but it's hard to get close contact with it.
Kim says that at Sequoia & when he worked at the Huntington, he jammed whole fistfulls of cuttings into the tightly packed sand & slammed the pots down hard to tamp them even further to create close contact of the stems with the media, then they went under intermittent mist. The closely packed cuttings humidified each other.
Yes, I read that many folks do very well with the burrito method. I haven't tried it a whole lot, but when I did, although I got lots of callous on the stems, I couldn't get the callous to push into roots. I haven't done it enough, need to practice more.
One of the weird, *wrong way* successes I've seen was this: a lady sent me cuttings (Ragged Robin & Fortuniana) but forgot to mail them Priority. It was in the summer & they took 10 days to arrive. She had wrapped them in damp newspaper & normally, you'd have expected them to be totally rotten upon arrival. But they came calloused! And rooted well, with a high percentage of takes--go figure!
Kim normally does burritos in cool weather--perhaps that's why I can't get them to push roots beyond the callous stage. Some things--like Fortuniana--never root for me without heat. I wish I could set up a more professional system, with bottom heat. I have used a hot bed in fall/winter of rotting hay under the cuttings to help, but I'm rethinking that because of how many times I've had varmints plowing through the cutting bed--I just have to raise them off the ground or enclose the bed much better.
Another neat nontraditional way is how Ralph Moore rooted tons of Pink Clouds cuttings--a vigorous multiflora hybrid that is an excellent root stock. He just poked holes in coffee cans--along the sides, too, IIRC, & stuffed them full of fat stems to be used as stocks & stuck them under the mist!
Q
