Steve.... I totally agree about reading Jack Harkness ... almost any of his books. Every time I read them, I read them with new eyes and learn even more. His book The Makers of Heavenly Roses kind of gave me a time line for the development of roses over the last couple of centuries. I love it, as well as Roses. This may seem long, but this is what Harkness wrote before he listed his bibliography: "When supplying information, one should identify the authority, so that suspicious readers may check for themselves, the trusting may know in what they trust, and the enthusiastic may explore the same sources for their further edification ..... ... Rose literature is an extraordinary hodge-podge of dutiful instruction, earnest research, hopeful fictions, sloppy sentimentality, confident autobiography, bad poetry and well-intended moralizing. I think it may be said that out of the hundreds of rose books, only a few were truly worthy of being published. And the influence of those few can be seen in the lesser ones, distorted like the bottom of a swimming pool seen through well-used water. There is an imprecision of information which almost passes belief, until we remember that most of the people concerned with roses were most likely to file facts in their heads than commit them to paper; and those cheerful sons of the soil are less to be blamed than the scribes, who constructed a hypothesis upon a hint, and copied it one from the other as a fact. I cannot offhand point to any rose book in which I have failed to find an error; and i know many in which errors could justly be called howlers. When you write of something which comes not from your own experience you need to be careful indeed. Even the masters are not free from error; but I forgive them as I hope for pardon in my turn, and gladly acknowledge my debt to them ...." The man could really write. Smiles, Lyn

Rose viewing is right here in the gallery forum there much better truer pics than a glossy expensive book can offer and alot of people have great skills in getting real nice picks I tend to think some of em are pros but I know it is a passion of sharing they posses Zone rose growing is a very good idea but you can read up Chances are there posting there zone like you did Types of roses Well there are many from climbers HTS to ground covers oldfasions ect ect ect sometimes you can read a lil bit on the general rose forum for a better discription but youll catch on from a HT to a climber in no time I found organic rose growing to be a very good place to post about pest and problems a webb site from a rather humorus guy named Bob he,ll tell you lots too he has 1000's of em too including pics it is very informative from whos who to where to pest site prep how to buy ect ect ect it's not a nice glossy book but for a beginner I reccomend it highly after a while you can buy the book if you want but by far the pics here show a rose as it realy is... if you find a rose you want but still want to see it dont hessitate to ask for a pic or two of it someone proberly has it Roses and everything about em copy save and read away he has 1000's of good pics too Bobs humor and visit us often http://www.rose-roses.com/index.html

I'm looking forward to growing more and will post pictures as they mature. I am buying from different sources and rooting some I come upon. I have found Antique Rose Emporium to send lovely own root plants that are quite large and well rooted, upon planting they take off. I made a trip to Rouge Valley Roses to pick up my order and was allowed to wander through the amazing number of varieties they grow. They were very helpful and I was surprised at the maturity of the band plants, many of them boxed in bloom. The scent of their gardens is amazing. They are NOT a retail nursery and I felt fortunate to be able to pick my roses up and got five more varieties that caught my eyes and nose. I have quite a bit of shade with my mixed pine, cedar and oak forest that I am growing. Thank you for all of your suggestions.

Better Homes and Gardens makes a nice, general book about roses that helps you identify diseases and pests and provides solutions. They also have a nice little guide suggesting roses for specific areas of the country and a good little section on growth habit etc as well as a brief history. You can find it here: http://www.amazon.com/Better-Homes-Gardens-Rose-Gardening/dp/0470878452 There's a good new rose book called Roses Without Chemicals that goes into the more modern roses that are bred to resist disease and perform well on their own roots. I found it enjoyable, although it mostly reads like a Kordes catalog (almost all the roses he recommends are from Kordes). I do wish he would have spread out to other breeders a bit. But overall its a good book with good suggestions especially for beginners or people who want to make the switch to an organic garden. I also recently got a new book called Foolproof Guide to Growing Roses. I enjoyed this one, even though it was also very general. But they had a great guide on growth habit and a neat little section on how to make rose supports that I thought was really great. They even had a few pages on how to make a support to grow a rose to the side of a house and how to attach it to the wall. As of yet I've never seen a rose book address this kind of information. I thought it was neat. Another thing I really liked about this book is that it showed microscopic photos of what black spot spores looked like as well as nematodes (both good and bad) and all sorts of other neat things. Overall out of all the rose books I've read, this one was my favorite. David Austin makes some beautiful books about roses if you like to just have books with pretty rose pictures in them (I do). They can be pricey but you can get them used on Amazon for fraction of the price. (Sometimes even for $.01 and you just pay $3.99 shipping.) There is also a good OGR book called Antique Roses For The South if you live in the south or like Old Garden Roses. The Botanica books on roses (Encyclopedias) are popular, but they are somewhat useless as they just list varieties and a short (tiny actually) description of each rose. You can get much better info on any rose in question by looking online. And alot of the roses they feature are no longer in the market, so they are pretty much impossible to find. But my best advice is to be sure you don't go ordering old rose books. These old books are outdated in both their information and in the roses they recommend. Some of the old roses that were popular in the 60s and 70s (even 80's) can't even be found now (although some of the really good ones are still around). And pesticide use was not as well regulated back then so they sometimes recommend things that are down-right dangerous. I bought an old rose book from the 70's about growing roses in Florida (not a lot of books available on rose gardening in Fl) and they recommended spraying Nemagone in the ground. Well guess what? Nemagone was pulled from the shelves in the early 80's because it was found to cause men to become sterile. A ton of young men working banana fields in the tropics lost their ability to have children because of it. That's what I mean by dangerous. Stick to books from the millennium and you should be able to find some great roses and some good advice. And don't forget to ask us here at Garden Web, we love to share our rose knowledge too.