Five Popular Rose Gardening Books
How do you decide on the best rose gardening books to buy? A very simple method is to read the reviews of books on online book stores. You can also participate in rose gardening forums where you will find other members discussing the best books to buy. Here is a compilation of 5 rose gardening books that have drawn rave reviews.
The Rose by David Austin: A comprehensive guide for cultivating roses with beautiful illustrations and detailed descriptions. David Austin also gives his valuable opinion on each of the roses in the book. This can help you select the best type of roses to buy for your garden. He also describes how to increase your rose stock with cuttings. Judging by the favorable reviews, you cannot go wrong in picking up this book.
Roses for Dummies by Lance Walheim & Editors of National Gardening Association: This book is recommended by many as a very easy to read and informative book. It acts as a guide to trouble-free rose gardening with special tidbits on pruning polyanthas and floribundas. A must-have for all novice rose gardeners.
Best Roses (Amateur Gardening Guide) by Stefan T. Buczacki: A very detailed book on the different types of climbers, shrubs, ramblers, miniatures, etc. It carries the author’s personal thoughts and advice on almost any kind of rose. There is a lot of information on disease-resistant and shade-tolerant varieties. It even has snippets on various features like rose hips.
The Organic Rose Garden by Liz Druitt: An excellent guide to beginners living in Zones 6 upwards. It includes some background information on roses and gives detailed guidelines on growing roses organically. It describes how to prepare and design rose beds, how to buy, plant, and maintain roses without using chemicals, etc. The book is punctuated with humor and is written in a very easy style. It gives information relating to Zones, flowering frequency, size of plant, color and fragrance of blooms, etc, in a neatly organized manner. The book concludes with a section on rose recipes. The pictures are rather grainy in the paperback version so only pick up the hardcover if you are particular about the illustrations.
Otherwise Normal People (Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening) by Aurelia C. Scott: Although it was touted as a scandalous book, it turned out to be quite a pleasant reading experience. The book just reveals the things that people do to gain a competitive edge in the exclusive world of exhibition roses. Scott describes how a seemingly harmless pastime can become an all-consuming passion. On the downside, the focus is more on the newer varieties and has very little information on the good old garden roses. In spite of some factual errors that seem to have crept past the editor’s eye, the book makes an overall good read for rose lovers.
Choosing the right rose gardening books will help you choose the right roses for your garden.
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