I started out years ago with handwritten markers next to the roses and a drawing of the garden bed with the roses marked on it. Then I gradually increased until I needed a looseleaf binder to hold a page for each rose I had planted, and finally I graduated to an Excel spread sheet. I still do the hand drawn map of each bed (there are now over a dozen distinct areas in my garden so that many maps) and I still have markers next to each rose although now I use a labeler to write out the name. I can identify from memory almost every one of my 200 roses. (But now and then I have brain fade and I have to bend down to check the marker, LOL!) The spreadsheet just helps me track where I bought the rose, own root or grafted, what year, fragrance, size, disease resistance and other info I might find useful.

I have about three hundred varieties of roses and about five hundred plants, and I'm not nearly as organized as I should be. For me, and I guess for anyone who has a lot of roses, multiple strategies are essential. I have my roses listed on HelpMeFind under the name "Il Giardino ai Papa". This list is mainly for those who want to know what roses I have (for exchange purposes, for example) so that I won't have to mail either a computer file or a bulky paper list. Then I have my critically important Excel spreadsheet, sorted by rose class, then rose name, and including plant source, ease of propagation by cutting, and space for comments. I don't keep information here that I can readily access elsewhere. I have a paper printout of my spreadsheet that I take notes on, and I update the spreadsheet online annually, generally a job for late fall when I know what has survived a year in the garden, as we also plant at this time. I have a garden notebook, much neglected lately, but in which I keep all my plant orders and invoices of shipments received. Labeling the rose is where I break down. I keep the nursery labels on the plant, then, at least in theory, I add a more permanent label, in my case using ones made of Tyvek, available in a roll of 1000, and written on in pencil. I've used aluminum labels that you impress with a stylus of some sort, but have found that they're hard to see on the plant, especially the many-caned, leafy, once-flowering old roses. The pencil-written Tyvek labels are durable, but they get lost, disappear in the foliage, have to be shifted to a new cane when the old one dies or is pruned away...all kinds of things happen. So maps are important. I have some of my garden mapped and need to map much more of it, plus update the maps I have. All this is complicated by mis-named roses. Roses arrive mislabeled by the nursery; or they've been in commerce for years or decades with a wrong name; or cuttings come from friends, named, misnamed, or with no name at all; or mystery roses arrive to take up residence, with no one involved having any idea at all what variety they are. These roses add considerably to the confusion. (I mostly have old and older roses, where these problems are perhaps more common than among modern varieties.) Melissa

For the public herb garden we made rectangular bronze labels cut out of a sheet of bronze with a band saw. We taped the edges with masking tape to form a border and used stick on letters to mask where the name's letters went. Then the labels were dipped in a ferric chloride bath until enough was eaten away so the letter and edges were raised above the background. The label were then neutralized with baking soda and copious amounts of water and the masking tape and letters were removed. Finally holes were drilled in the four corners of the border. Since the herb garden beds were outlined with railroad ties around the outer edges and landscaping timbers around the paths, the labels could be nailed into these wooden edges of the beds. Very classic and very work intensive. We didn't move the plants much and with practice I became very good at prying the labels off with a screw driver and a dandelion digger on the rare occasions they needed to be moved. On the other end of the spectrum, I have made labels out of strips of used gallon milk jugs with the letters punched with a paper punch. The labels were attached to the plants by making a slit in one end of the label, curling the label around a plant stem and inserting the other end in the slit. Cath

SeattleSuze and Wild Rose: Even if you don't have a scanner, I think you could take it to a Kinko's and have them scan it and place the file on a CD for you. I'd make sure the drawing to be scanned is done in black ink on a white paper, clean lines - have it scanned at a resolution of 600 or 1200 and saved as line art (NOT in pixels). It can be saved as a line Photoshop file (an .eps), at which time you can reduce the resolution to 300. Then it can be placed into a file in your word processing program (on a Mac, something like PageMaker or QuarkXPress - I'm not familiar with the Microsoft programs). The beauty of this type of Photoshop file is that you can use it as though it is transparent, with just the lines showing, and you can place colored or patterned background behind it to show through - say, a pink background, with a dark color chosen for the line, say crimson. Of course, that is just playing around. For a plain workaday chart, you can just place the file into your WP program as a plain black-and-white illustration. Either way, once your art is placed into the WP program, you can just type in the names where you want them. I should mention that it's been a few years since I was doing this kind of work, and I imagine there have been some changes in these programs, the world of software being what it is. But if you know someone who's into all this, or if there's a Kinko's nearby, something LIKE this can be done. I don't know for sure if Kinko's performs a scanning service, but I do know that they used to have "design stations" where, for a fee, you could work on their equipment. Good luck. Laura