Ortho's All About Roses

Ortho's All About Gardening

by Thomas Cairns

A guide to selecting and growing roses, with instructions on pruning and fertilizing, with tips on landscaping with roses and designing a rose garden

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 1999

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an older book I found at the library mostly to scratch the itch I have every year this time to fill the grounds with roses, which is foolhardy at best as the humidity here makes it impossible to grown any but Knockouts without major intervention of the kind that is offensive to Mother Nature and guilt-inducing to one who desires to garden without ghastly chemicals with warning labels that frighten even the most lion-hearted rose lover or at least drive one to drink. WEll, Beverley Nichols often advised certain cocktails for particular garden tasks and if you have ever read the label of a bottle of rose fungicide you would immediately toss back a shot of something bracing just to go on. I myself only have the one real rose bush left. All else succumbed to one horrid blight or another. Indeed, the last big hurricane broke my heart because even the huge oak on the house was a nightmare, the loss of my lovely row of very old, painfully lovely miniature roses, who never did anybody a bit of harm, was heartbreaking indeed. I could have used a nice cocktail after finding them squashed into oblivion under a big honkin ugly sweetgum tree, I tell you that much for free. Alas, the liquour stores, like everything else, were closed for ages after the hurricane. I should have stocked up before hand with something nice like sherry. Or brandy. Heroines in novels are always being offered brandy after a shock aren't they?
But I have digressed again. This book is just the sort I might actually buy actually. It's one of those oversized paperbacks like a coffee table. The photographs are very nice but the pages with pictures of the different bugs and diseases that plague roses are worth everything. One hears about things like "blackspot" and, shudder, "powdery mildew", but one doesn't really know what plagues her poor darlings until ones sees excellent pictures like these. They are very detailed and most helpful. Like having one's own rose doctor at one's fingertips. I might just try proper rose gardening again now that I've found this. Of course it has all kinds of helpful advice about the various types of roses and goes into as much detail about their care as anyone might care to read. I had no idea the different types were so, well, different. I mean about how their needs and wants could be so varying. Well, anyone I might actually buy this one for myself but for now will xerox the pages on rose ailments and laminate them. Lord knows they will need protection for the fungicides as much as I will.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

another good resource book for gardening. I mostly skimmed through for information.