Thank you for posting the link. I enjoyed most of the content, but the numbers in the Quest-Ritson article left me feeling ill. For the Royal National Rose Society to have suffered a membership drop from 109,000 to about 2,000 members currently is just terrible.

Suji - You are welcome to stop by my open garden near Brookeville on May 29 -30. A few folks come from near and far to see the garden and how it is changing year to year. This year with the devistation of 3 Blizzards and crushed roses, I'm guessing that we will have much of the wild look of years some time ago which some visitors may welcome again. With warm weather after the snow, my rose classes appear to be a few days ahead of schedule. However, there should not be a significan shortage of bloom. We always welcome rose enthusiasts of all sorts. I am even cultivating more visits by teasing a couple of local garden clubs with OGR talks this spring to come and smell the roses - even the HT folks sneak a peak sometimes (I may have a few of them as well). Please stop by and enjoy whatever we have and share some of your OGR stories and ideas as well. We'd love to share the garden such as it may be this spring. PS - The roses have already begun to bloom. Father Hugo's rose, Old Blush and Sophie's Perpetual have already begun to bloom and some HP's buds are showing color. What's not to love about zone 6b? Best, Nick

There are as many reasons for not "being in cyberspace" as there are people. I could hardly be described as a Luddite yet I despise most email newsletters. I worked in tech support, and have a tech degree, and 2 professional computer certifications. Still I prefer my editor's exchange newsletters to be hard copy. Why? because your average rose society email newsletter is poorly done. Creating a computer file for a paper publication is very different from creating a computer file for a cyber publication, and the latter is not a skill that's been very necessary until recently. One major assumption people make is that everyone either has broadband internet at home, or can use their work email to receive personal email. These are not valid assumptions! But they go on to make email newsletters with ginormous file sizes because they want to include color photos. But, they don't seem to know how to compress those photos first, or to know when a photo really is unnecessary. Really, do we need to see yet another color photo of someone's Peace rose? we all know what it looks like by now! So I end up receiving newsletters that take 15 minutes (no exaggeration here) to download, and for what?? nothing much. One local society newsletter includes a color photo of each article's and column's author!!!!! boy, does that clog up the pipeline. It's nice to be able to put a face to the name, but at least make it a thumbnail so it downloads faster! we don't need a lot of resolution for that. File type compatibility is an issue few understand, too, as Mad Gallica stated above. Not everyone has the Windows version of Office. There are very good reasons for people to use other software, and email distributors have to understand that they can't expect everyone to have one particular brand of software. We have members who do not own a computer and who are retired. They're not going to be able to get a newsletter by email, period. I'm not willing to cut them off, especially when they've been very very active members for decades. Another assumption is that people are getting these emails. Some of the major webmail providers that lots of people use, do not accept mass emails, or have file size limitations on individual mailboxes so that emails with large attachments simply disappear without arriving, or have overly aggressive spam filtering that deletes legitimate emails, or just simply are unreliable. No email service is 100% reliable. The USPS is much more reliable, overall. We tried once sending our newsletter by email but it just wouldn't go to aol or yahoo addresses, and that was half our list. Our board has had email discussions before, but when people don't reply, you have to wonder if they didn't get the emails, which is a very real possibility. Age is not really a factor in computer literacy here, we have older members who are extremely computer literate, but I know as you go farther into the hinterlands, away from centers of high-tech employment, the age of computer competency drops. It's always this way with any technological shift. The kids are learning it in grade school, but personal computers didn't even exist when I was in school. We have a website, but it doesn't get a whole lot of traffic. Older people, who are more likely to be obsessed with roses, are less likely to think, 'Let's see if it's online!' But I think it's important to have one. It lets people find us for one, and it has a LOT of local cultural information on it that people can look up anytime, and it has our schedule and a map to our meetings and our show. Remember that the average age of posters on this forum is only 48, and I know that the bottom age group for members in our local society is basically mid forties. Jerijen: THANK YOU for your comments on reposting other people's work. The same goes, I might add, for republishing other's work in your own newsletter, without even attribution. One side effect of emailing newsletters is it makes it that much easier for your work to be lifted and republished without permission, just like anything posted on the Web. I've always figured that so long as people attribute properly I don't need them to ask permission first, it's not like this is commercial property here, but I have one regular writer who would rather people ask first before reprinting his stuff. Now: I wrote an article on how to make a good email newsletter, and it's been posted on the ARS website, and it's MY work so I can go ahead and post the link. Unfortunately it's hard to find so I don't think many people are going to see it otherwise. I won't bore you all by posting the whole thing here, those who want it can follow the link. Caution: it was posted in Word (.doc) format, rather than HTML or PDF. Here's something I've done before, and had work: save the file to your desktop, then change the file extension to a file type your computer CAN open, ie change .doc to .rtf or .txt. It'll look screwy because the formatting is lost but it should be readable.

The two page summary at the link made some interesting comments. For one, they did not induce HVX by way of SEEDS. Another, the higher the relationship to sieboldiana, the lower the possibility of HVX in those plants. Oh wow, I can see a big surge in folks buying Elegans and other sieboldiana offspring. Even with dessication, Frances Williams becomes a winner. Never heard of Great Arrival, which they specifically mention, but I suppose I must put it on my short list. Plus, the springtime is when most of the HVX is transmitted. Not during or after blooming, and not in late fall. Debris in the soil just about insures the presence of HVX will survive to infect. And a freshly infected hosta can infect other hosta too. Not familiar with the plant type they were able to infect with HVX, but it took two years for the exposure to test positive. I'm wondering what the prognosis would be for plants popped into the spot where an infected hosta was removed? Meanwhile, I'm thinking that I'd like to read the whole report. It seems that us potheads (i.e. hosta in pots gardeners) are a bit safer as long as we observe good garden cleanliness. Keeping the tools clean requires scrubbing, not simply immersing in something like the bleach. I'm glad to note that Dawn, once again, is a very useful product to keep on hand. Not just for washing down wildlife soaked from oil spills, but sanitizing gardening tools. If I were an in=ground hosta gardener, I'd have potholes all over the place. Cannot kill this HVX with boiling water like you can pernicious weeds. Just excavate and leave dormant for MORE THAN TWO YEARS? oh dear, that is no fun. I'm thinking that HVX is not my major problem. It is foliar nematodes. That, I think is the issue to concern warm climate hosta gardeners. Now I am waiting for advice from AHS on nems. Thanks for bringing this to the forum, Babka. NOTE: Great Arrival is a reverse sport of Great Expectations. Well, so much for putting it on the wish list. I'll have to go with Elegans and Frances Williams, and maybe Olive Bailey Langdon, which I do not have. Incidentally, there is no picture in HLibrary of a mature Great Arrival. I wonder if anyone has a mature one...... This post was edited by moccasinlanding on Sun, Sep 28, 14 at 16:07