nochintami I have a stack of books on roses. Probably 20 books high. I can honestly say I've looked through every single one of them and didn't learn a thing. It is often contradictory from book to book because they are written in general terms and not location specific. For information you will learn more from this forum than you ever will from a book. Now if you want to look at pictures that is a different story. No matter the subject you can go through the archives on here and find an answer and if you don't, ask, there is a wealth of knowledge among members.

I bought 2 rose books by Roger Phillips & Marty Rix, because in one thread Kim mentioned they were good rose books to have. I just remembered them after seeing this thread. :-) I'd better start reading......

@seil and beth zone..im looking for type of roses and history of roses..

nochintami, where are you located? I have a couple dozen. for me it was mostly looking at the pictures, I don't think I learned anything for them either...except roses to put on my wish list.

To give you any kind of information on what roses will do well for you we'd need to know where you live. Roses are very location specific sometimes. A rose that does really well in California might be awful in Michigan and vise versa. And really, the best way to find out what roses do well in your area is to talk to a local rose society. They have hands on experience with them and know what does well in your conditions. Most books, as Beth said, have to be very generalized in their information.

You may want to look at rose books through the library to find out which ones you want to hunt down. 'The History of the Rose' by Roy Shepherd is a standard as is 'Roses' by Jack Harkness. Graham Stuart Thomas wrote several well regarded books on roses which were later published together as 'The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book'. They all have a different emphasis. Harkness mostly talks about 20th century roses he is extremely familiar with. Shepherd is slightly tilted towards hardy roses. GST is slightly tilted toward warm climate roses.

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.

I just started reading this rose book-Old Roses by Roger Phillips & Marty Rix, it has individual rose history and photos, a great book!