The Essential Rose Garden: The Complete Guide to Growing, Caring for and Maintaining Roses

by Peter McHoy

A comprehensive guide to the different rose varieties and how to get the besbt from every type.

A practical guide to cultivating roses: planting, pruning and nurturing, with step-by-step photographs.

Features many practical ideas for designing with roses: planting roses in mixed borders, creative use of miniature and container roses for confined spaces, training climbing roses around perglas and arbors, raising standard roses and much more.

Over 275 beautiful, evocative photographs of roses in all their splendor.

Genres: Gardening

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 1998

Reviews

[Murinius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up this guide after coming back from the home improvement store with a miniature rose. I had gone in looking for a geranium, but they didn’t have any. May was well take this opportunity to learn something new and try to keep the plant alive (so far so good). The book is quite old, but from what I read on other sites the information is still sound, and it’s good to have it all in one place instead of having to search for it again or sift through bookmarks. Has instructions about sun, water and soil requirements, common rose problems, how to prune them, how to transplant them, different varieties of roses and how to arrange them in a garden, how to make cut roses last, and so on. Step-by-step guides usually have pictures. Another reviewer mentioned that nowadays there are hardier varieties available, which makes sense. Time flies in the flower fancy. I still enjoyed that section because it paints a rough timeline of rose varieties through history, between what was fashionable and what was possible to breed at a certain time and place.

One month update: Can confirm that the information in this book is correct. Followed the instructions here contained and the two wilting miniature roses I got are growing and already blooming.

[Rebekah Shapiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe a good orientation book. There are better books available in 2024, with information on more recently bred varieties. They breed for hardiness now, so the newer varieties are better. It does have good illustrations on pruning techniques and lots of pictures of varieties available at publication.