No comments about Better Homes and Gardens: Roses : The Gardener's Collection (Better Homes and Gardens the Gardener's Collection).

1 comments about Growing Good Roses.

1. This book is a great introduction to the wonderfully addictive world of growing roses. The author slowly succumbed, starting out using every square inch of patio at his san francisco townhouse for roses, and now owns a large ranch in Petaluma which is an ARS test garden. The book deals matter-of-factly with planting, growing, and pruning, giving you options and alternatives based on your climate, attitudes towards pesticides, available time, etc. Naming one's favorite rose is a tough question; mr. reddell provides a dozen or so of his, with detailed observations that have helped me be more critical in selecting the roses I grow. His encouragement to show roses led me into my first rose shows - i enjoyed the experience hugely and have nearly a dozen ribbons now to show for it (no trophies yet...). I recommend this book as a starting point for anyone who is beginning to grow roses, and would like to be as effective as they can within the time they have available. It's been very valuable for me.

2 comments about Ornamental Grasses for Western Gardens.

1. For years now, I've long been wanting to include grasses in my garden, but have been holding back for fear of planting something that won't like my climate, something that will become an invasive pest, something that will up and die on me. Marilyn Raff's new book, Ornamental Grasses for the Western Garden, has several good points that made it an excellent investment for me. In Raff's book, the plants have all been pre-selected by the author to succeed in my hot, arid climate. When grasses first became the new "must-have" thing, I bought a good reference book on the subject, but it was encyclopedic, meant for use by all gardeners in all climates. Every time I found a grass I liked, it turned out to have requirements I couldn't meet, such as a need for constant moisture. I soon became discouraged and gave up on finding grasses that would work for me. With Raff's book, I don't have to worry. Most of the plants selected will do well in my Northern California garden, where the clay is heavy and summer water is hard to come by.
   
   Secondly, Raff loves plants, and shares that love with her readers by discussing the many companion plants she grows with her grasses. I was gently led to discover new things besides grasses that would do well in my garden. Nearly every plant in every photo is clearly identified with both botanical and common names, so I wasn't left wondering in frustration when I saw something appealing that wasn't a grass.
   
   The third "good thing" is the Quick Reference Grass Chart at the back of the book. It conveniently lists the plant name, height, color, water needs, preferred exposure, etc., on four convenient pages. I photocopied those and went back through the book, marking each plant I liked on the copies. It's a ready-made shopping list that I can easily take with me when I visit the nursery. When I go into the garden to plant, it will help me choose the best planting site to achieve the finest results.
   
   Last, but not least, are the photographs themselves, some of which are superb. I'm a photo-driven reader. I see a good photo of a plant and I want the plant, then I check the text to see if it will do well for me. Mind you, the book does have some flaws, and the photos that are of poor or indifferent quality are the worst of it. In some cases the photo was clearly taken for other reasons than to spotlight the grass, which is sometimes barely in the frame. In other cases, the author is having trouble with depth of focus and the results are fuzzy. Sometimes the plant is just not looking its best, no recommendation to grow one in my garden. The author's evocative description of porcupine grass was not enough to convince me I wanted one and it was only a distant blur in Raff's photo. Luckily, my other grass book had a good close-up of it and that plus Raff's recommendation convinced me to add it to the shopping list.
   
   Best of all is the author's laid back garden-side manner. For fear of doing the wrong thing, I've been reluctant to try grasses and have avoided them for years. Raff has given me the confidence to act, at long last.



2. This is a valuable reference for the serious gardener, or those like me, who want to have a varied, well landscaped garden. The author knows her subject well. With this book, you will learn how to select grasses by color, texture, size, and how to plant them to complement the arrangement of other flowering plants and shrubs in a complete and beautiful garden. The book is filled with pictures. There is also a handy reference table of 60 ornamental grasses with their physical characteristics and suitable US environmental zones.

No comments about Old-Time Roses Notebook (Decorative Notebooks).

3 comments about Taylor's Guide to Roses (Taylor's Gardening Guides).

1. This book is great if you're trying to determine which roses will work best for your zone. However, be aware that if you're looking at this book as a resource/color guide for cut flowers, garden flowers and the roses you buy from a florist are different! These are garden favorites(with a few hybrids).

   Best to buy this selection to help you decide on what's right for your zone/region. And hey, its $5 cheaper than it is at Garden.com!




2. All of the Taylor books seem to be written for non-western gardens. I have 4 of their books and yet whenever I want to look up a plant I've seen in a nursery I rarely find it in these books. This is not the book you want if you are hoping for a good resource for roses. This is a guide book, when you want to look up a rose you saw at a nursery to find out a little more about it. The book divides the roses by class so if you are like most people and looking to buy a hybrid tea this book has fewer than 100. There are thousands and thousands of roses on the market, the odds that you will find it in this book is nil unless you are looking for Peace or the most common. This is a small book, you could spend your money better elsewhere. I recommend Botanica's Encyclopedia of Roses.



3. The Taylor's Guide to Roses is, like its companion volumes, handy to have around as a supplement to other books on roses. In itself it is neither complete nor entirely reliable; however, its many attractive photos are useful, especially for people who are not familiar with the various classifications of roses. I particularly appreciate that it gives equal space to old roses, shrub roses, and species, as the round of hybrid teas grows tiresome to the eye and these plants deserve far more garden space than they receive.

   Overall, best used as a visual aid for form--color, as in any book, is subject to the vagaries of nature and photography.

4 comments about Modern Roses XI: The World Encyclopedia of Roses.

1. This edition of Modern Roses takes a giant step up from the last one! (MR10) By including *all* roses that could be reasonably well-documented, the usefulness of this reference has increased dramatically. In addition, the inclusion of a CD-ROM with great search capabilities is FANTASTIC.

   Of course... as with any book of this nature... there are still a few errors in description, etc. However, this is very minor, compared to the volume of information contained.

   Indispensable reference work for serious rose lovers.




2. If you love roses and if you want to know about the full range of rose varieties that you may encounter at your local nursery or in mail order catalogues, this volume is essential. The expense is justified in part by the CD-ROM, which gives you the ability to search the underlying database at will. I enjoyed the pictures (although they don't match other works like Botannica) as well as the articles on famous European rose gardens. In any work of this magnitude there are bound to be errors (e.g., Meilland's Michelangelo is yellow, not pink), but the overall accuracy is very impressive. If you are only dabbling in rose growing, this encyclopedic work is probably more than you need. But if you are crazy about roses, you will be crazy about this book.



3. I bought this book and CD in the hopes of being able to identify several rose plants that my husband had rescued from the city's bulldozers. It is not designed for an amateur like me who needs pictures and drawings. I am less interested in the parentage of roses than I am in what the terms "semi-double, reverse, exhibition form, cupped" mean. Some roses did not even have the color of the bloom listed. The CD is great if you know the name of the rose you wish to search for, but cumbersome if you do not. Yes, you can search based on characteristics of a rose, but it's not easy. For example, there are no drop-down menus for options on search criteria. A search for a red rose with a "strong" fragrance yielded no results; "intense" fragrance did. When the results are shown, there is no number count on how many roses fit the criteria, and when you select one rose from the results to view, you must re-perform the search to look at another one. It's extremely frustrating. There are pictures of roses on the CD, but the search result listing does not show you which ones have pictures and which do not. Help is limited to FAQ's (with only two questions listed) and an email address. There is no online method for updating the program so there is no hope of this version becoming any better. ...



4. This 638-pages work, published previously by the American Rose Society (ARS), is THE nitty-gritty dig for serious rose growers, plant science researchers; those involved with academic and industrial settings, horticultural nurseries, botanical gardens, and informed amateur enthusiasts. There are descriptions for more than 25,000 roses along with a sparsely populated (28) group of token photographs. The current edition is list priced at $130.00 and includes a CD.

5 comments about In Search of Lost Roses.

1. Thomas Christopher, a garden writer with a great deal of experience went looking for wild roses. His trip took him all over the United States from Connecticut to Texas to California to the American South. He discovered a unique fellowship of individuals who over the years have grown and thus preserved what are known as `old roses'.

   I happen to grow Blanc Double de Courbet in my own garden, so was a little annoyed to read that one of Mr. Christopher's interviewees (Mike Lowe of Nashua NH) did not particularly like this particular Rugosa rose. I agree the blossoms are not very tidy as they wither on the plant, but cut a few of these roses in full bloom and bring them in the house and you won't care about the faded blossoms (which are more scented than some of the modern hybrids in full bloom). I like to place a vase of these white roses next to my reading chair. The scent is so fabulous that from time to time I become aware of it no matter how engrossing the book.

   Christopher interviews folks in California who live in the old gold mine areas where everything is in shambles except the roses growing madly in the abandoned gardens. He interviews elderly Black women who have grown old roses abandoned by their employers who took up with the new hybrids. The true identity of the roses is often unknown (or was not known before modern genetics) and thus the roses have acquired the names of the persons who `saved' them. For example, one rose named `Miss Mary Minor' was later identified as `Souvenir de la Malmaison'.

   Malmaison, as anyone who grows roses knows was the garden of Josephine Bonaparte. All garden writers who tell the tale like to remind readers that even the British during their battles with Napoleon accommodated Malmaison. Josephine was able to maintain her garden and stay in contact with British Rosarians in spite of the sea battles that raged around her.

   Which leads to the decision of the United States to name the rose as the national flower (the rose is the national flower of England not France). Some of us are old enough to remember Senator Dirksen lauding the marigold and nominating it for the honor of national flower. Chistopher reminds the reader that like Benjamin Franklin and the turkey, Dirksen was doomed to fail. In the end, the US congress chose the rose. Some us like to imagine the American rose is a wild five-petaled rose and not one of those silly hybrids found in florist's shops.




2. I first read this book over ten years ago - I found it to be soothing and exciting and just plain fun at times. Thomas Christopher knew just how to make the search for old roses a dream for me. Since that time, with the Internet and old rose nurseries, finding old roses has become a rather mundane procedure. But this book brings me back to the time when the only way to find old roses was in an old cemetery or the garden of the 90 year old widow around the corner. In many ways, that was more fun.



3. The first book I remember from my childhood is The Tasha Tudor Book of Fairy Tales. Tasha Tudor's illustrations always include garlands of roses, and I always knew I was going to have a garden absolutely full of roses. As a young adult, I was disillusioned with the modern hybrids that were available at that time. They looked stiff and unlovely in the garden, they had little fragrance, and they fell prey to black spot and the cold northern climate. After spending huge amounts of time, effort, and money, I had given up on roses. Then, in the odd way things happen, I came upon this book in the return shelf at the library. I started reading it, and finally realized what was wrong in my experience with roses. The ideal rose in my imagination was a historic rose, not a modern hybrid tea! Thomas Christopher, even though he was a horticulturist, made the same discovery though serendipity. It is really fun to read how he discovered the world of heirloom roses and the people who grow them. You will find yourself enjoying this book while reading it, and then realizing later how much you learned from it. The book led to my gardening with old roses, and later, David Austin Roses, which are everything I ever hoped for in roses. If you want to read more about the history of the rose, another very interesting book on the subject is The Quest for the Rose by Phillips and Rix.



4. This an easy to read book that meanders like a rose garden path through the lives and history of roses and gardeners. The most interesting bits to me were when the author sidetracked into the how and why someone raised roses or wrote a book or painted pictures of them more than the actual botanical 'begats'. He followed roses as they traveled all the routes that were famous in history from the Silk Road to the Oregon Trail. A good book to read on the patio overlooking the rose garden on lovely summer day.



5. This is really a fun book that is enriching, informing, and just makes you feel good. Now that old garden roses have become common place again, IN SEARCH OF LOST ROSES probably doesn't have the "umph!" it once had, but I would still reccomend it to anyone. It almost makes you wish you could go back to those days when the old garden roses were rare treasures that wanted hunting to be found.
   
   In short: It's a classic!

2 comments about Climbing Roses of the World.

1. This is a comprehensive, world-wide study of climbing and rambling roses. The topic is a huge one, especially as the writer refuses to be constrained by the contributions of any one country. Most of the leading writers on roses have been American, English or French. The writer adds in the considerable contributions of rose growers in Australia, Germany and Italy as well as other countries.

   Despite difficulties in taxonomy and in tracing the history of each rose, the writer has included some 1600 currently grown climbing and rambling roses. I was happy to see an explanation of the differences between the two. Climbers have a small number of stiff stems. Ramblers have a larger number of more pliable stems, and these often trail along the ground. To confuse the issue, some ramblers are known as semi-climbers, and some small climbers are known as "pillar roses". Let's confuse it even further - climate can make a considerable difference in growth. A rose that is a climber in one country may be a shrub in another.

   The writer is Director of England's National Rose Society and he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the topic as well as the resources to research it throughout the world. The book covers the origin and history of each of the roses and the reader learns about the people and circumstances behind each of the different varieties.

   The colour photographs of the roses, taken by the author in gardens around the world, are exceptionally fine Each rose is identified, of course, but we also find out in which garden and which country the photograph was taken.

   This is a book for the gardener who loves roses. It contains a vast amount of information, well organized and presented.




2. This book is exclusively devoted to climbing roses and is a welcome addition to rose reference works (as the author states, only two have previously been published, one by G.A. Stephens in 1933 and the other by Graham Stuart Thomas in 1965).

   Over 1600 roses are covered here. They are arranged in chapters by classes (Chinese Synstylae and other species, Rosa gigantea and Rosa chinensis, Aryshire and Evergreen roses, Rosa setigera and the Boursault Roses, Noisettes and Tea roses, Rosa multiflora, Turner's Crimson Rambler Race, Wichurana hybrids, New Dawn and its descendants, Kordesii hybrids, Climbing Sports and Large Flowered Climbers). Within each of these chapters, the author divides the roses by hybridizer. A richly detailed biographical account of the breeder is usually given which is followed by a list of the roses he/she hybridized and a brief description of each rose. A final chapter, "Cultivating Climbing Roses" discusses growing roses in general. A section of 200 beautiful color plates is featured in the center of the book.

   Only one gripe - sizes of roses is given in the metric system which is annoying but at least it will help you to learn meters and centimeters!

No comments about Shrub Roses: Paradise in Bloom.

No comments about Success with (Success with Gardening).