Dang -- Stephen's going to be all over! CO on Oct. 4, Petaluma the weekend of Oct. 21, and Antique Rose Emporium the weekend of Nov. 2-3-4. That boy's got his travelin' shoes on! Jeri

The news will go out in the January Gold Coast HRG Quarterly, and I've forwarded it to the "Rose Letter" Editor. Anita, it might be worthwhile to try to get an article (with photos of course) in to the ARS Magazine, so more people can be made aware of the event. Jeri

was looking at a business (palm) site based on Long Island, noticed with great interest how the man was setting out a Windmill. he poured hydrogen peroxide into the crown (as a fungicide, I guess) and he also fed the tree with pulverized unscented Epsom salts. question: do we have this 411 as a resource for people here? it could be helpful, no?

We were active members of the local society when we had a local society. Some of the above post have started to nibble at the edges of the real issues. 1. Distance. There are limits to how far people will go to attend a meeting. Most of our regular attendees traveled less than half an hour to the meetings. The farthest among them traveled about 45 minutes. While some people may happily travel longer, it is a very real constraint. 2. Time of meetings. Every group I've been involved in has been torn in half between two very basic points of view. Older, retired people often dislike driving at night, and prefer holding meetings weekend afternoons. Younger, working people dislike having meetings during their prime gardening hours and prefer holding meetings weekday evenings. 3. Programming. This was our biggest issue. There really aren't that many speakers/programs with the breadth of experience to give a totally new program every year. It isn't easy to come up with interesting enough programs once a month, almost every month, year after year. This is the one area the ARS really let us down. Because of our size, we were very dependent on outside material. At that point, they had about 3 canned programs on hardy roses, and that was it. It was equally hard to get appropriate newsletter material from outside. If you are far enough north that you can pretty much cut and paste standard HT culture articles, this isn't going to be an issue. If you feel the standard articles need a lot of editing to be accurate, then you are going to be in our position where everything has to be created by your society, and that is a lot of work. 4. Participation. 'Many hands make light work' is true. None of this is a problem if you have enough people willing to help. If you can get 12 people to each contribute a newsletter article once a year, that's an original article every month, with nobody doing a lot of work. However, you have to ask a lot of people to get those 12. The same is true for every other society job. Someone may be willing to be President for a year or two, but quits in a huff after ten years because they have been pushed too far. Notice I haven't said anything about shows. Within fairly reasonable guidelines, shows can be what the local society wants them to be. We had shows where the Dowager and Modern Shrub classes had more entries and more exhibitors than Exhibition HT. If we had continued on, we were seriously considering creating our own Shrub certificates because we needed a Shrub court.