I really love Carolyn Parker's "R is for Rose." It isn't strongly educational, but it combines great photos of beautiful flower arrangements with very nice garden shots, and lovely text about 26 roses. It immediately came to mind as something to give in lieu of a bouquet of flowers. It's a lovely keepsake of a book. Anita

Nice to hear from you Chantel---keep us posted as your memorial garden evolves- Florence

Thank you so much Krista! Yes, I just love Anna de Diesbach! It's so strange that here I am dreading white in my Garden and here is Penny Lane teaching me to sit down and Shut Up, lol! It is fast becoming one of my favorite roses. Tammy, once you've been involved in Agility, you will be probably like the rest of the Agility folks, ADDICTED, haha! And the dogs have sooo much fun. Life will never be the same, and no, agility dogs will not be jumping over the fence. They will always love their "Puppy School" and can immediately distinguish Puppy School from the plain and boring fence which they'll just ignore, lol! I Promise You This, lol! I'm a bit jealous that you are in Tennessee. Much more opportunities to go to several trials. Kansans have to travel very, very far to get enough trials to compete, but we've got some totally Awesome World Class competitors here. One Kansan even won 1st place in one of the International European Competitions this year. And there are others who regularly make it to World International Team competitions. Must be in the water that Kansans drink, hahaha! Eluane and I can only win through Lord-Blessed Miracles. We only compete 4-5x a year; it's all we can afford. Almost all dog agility folks in Kansas compete in other venues, not just AKC, and they will travel several hundreds of miles as well so they average about 24 trials at the very minimum per year. They also attend classes, seminars from famous handlers. I've been a freelancer/unemployed for over 2 years so we've only taken one class total, lol! So we do the best that we can and count on the Good Lord to carry us the rest of the way, haha! We do have a club membership so we can still practice on our own once a week, so that is good! But not having an instructor is a huge!!!!! problem. You really need classes to do well in agility. I have to depend on my friends in England for advice and we've already made many critical mistakes in trying to do training on our own.... Our training has been experiment after experiment... The rosette is from our Hardest Level, Excellent AKC Jumpers and the course was challenging. We're still stuck in Open though for Standard. We need 2 more wins to get to Excellent :) We also got a very late start in agility. Eluane began at 4.5 years and now she just turned 6 which is "ancient" compared to the fast younger dogs. That's like running a 42 year old compared to a dog in its prime 20 year old range so not much time left for us. But it's still so fun and rewarding and we take the Moments of Grace in our time and stride!

It looks like someone cared a lot about the garden and then no one did anymore. It is really sad. The roses look pretty good despite the neglect. I hope some rosy gardeners find it again someday and bring it back to its former glory. Maybe if you posted the name of the town someone living nearby will be motivated to go and tend it?