Let's be clear, however, about which roses need special winter care and which ones don't. Shrub roses don't need any attention whatsoever. Hybrid tea roses may benefit from taking extra precautions.

Once, while doing a speaking engagement in Minnesota, I visited a rose garden - in the dead of winter. There wasn't any more than an inch of snow on the ground, but I noticed something was missing. "Where are the roses?" I asked. "Oh those," came the reply, "We bury them in winter." Each fall, they dig up the hybrid tea roses and bury them beneath a foot of soil.

The experience made me thankful to live here, where such extraordinary measures aren't necessary to enjoy hybrid tea roses. To be sure, a bit of extra care doesn't hurt, but often the hybrid tea roses make it through winter if just left alone.

To start with, don't cut them back or do pruning of any kind. Pruning encourages growth; new growth is killed during winter. Often, as a result, the whole plant dies.

If you want to offer extra protection, protect the graft. It's the Achilles heal of hybrid tea roses. It's the area at the base of the plant where the tea rose is grafted onto different root stock. Not all tea roses are treated in this manner, but tea roses just aren't very vigorous. They're usually grafted onto the roots of stronger wild roses. But the graft union is susceptible to winter cold.

If that union can stay below ground in winter, it will likely survive. The easy way is to simply mound six inches of soil on and around the base of the plant. Buy a few bags of top soil for this purpose or use potting soil as you empty your patio pots. You can buy rose collars at a nursery, or fashion one from chicken wire, but the soil-mounding technique seems to work perfectly well.

In late winter, remove the soil. Then commence with the pruning. Roses is Colorado usually perform quite well. Low humidity helps alleviate fungus and diseases that afflict roses in other parts of the country. With winterization, your roses can bloom beautifully year after year.