Roses. - book reviews

Sunset, Jan, 1990

Roses

This is a

month for roses

Why would a book about roses be recommended during the gray, wet, relatively flowerless month of January? Gardeners who grow roses know why: here in the mild-winter West (but not the snowywinter parts), we're entering the two-month season for planting new roses and pruning those we planted in earlier years. Winter is backstage preparation for the big floral display from May to October.

Do Sunset readers like to grow roses?

They certainly do! Whenever we survey readers about the plants they grow, large numbers--63 to 84 percent--tell us they grow roses. (Runners up are azaleas, camellias, ferns, and fruit trees.)

The Sunset book Roses (96 pages; $6.95) must serve these fanciers well because it and its earlier editions have been selling strongly since the subject was first addressed in 1955. The book has grown impressively over those years. The 1955 edition showed 20 kinds of roses in color; the current one (1989) includes color photographs of 136.

On page 112 of this magazine, you see a bouquet to 10 different Austin, or English, roses--a kind that, in Southern California at least, is just beginning to develop from a strictly mail-order to an established over-the-counter nursery item. In Roses, this attractive group is presented with shrub roses, a catch-all category with one common denominator: all the plants in this section serve well as flowering landscape shrubs.