Customer Reviews

The Organic Rose Garden

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
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This book is truly excellent if you live below the Mason-Dixon line and are just starting out with roses. She gives detailed coverage of a great many roses well adapted to the South, as well as growing roses without a lot of chemicals. I like this book so much, I carry it with me when I travel (which I do 3 wks/month), which tells you something. Beautiful pictures, good details on roses and great advice. I highly recommend this esp. if you are new to roses.

This book is a must for the novice or experienced gardener whether organic or not. It is well written and includes background of roses, preparing the beds, designing the beds, purchasing and propagating the roses, maintaining the roses organically, organic prevention of and solutions to problems, rose classes and quick reference chart, roses that thrive in organic gardens, 175 species and cultivars and recipes for home grown organic roses. Her style of writing is clear and humorous and beautiful pictures abound. The book is 6 inches by 9 inches so is easy to haul to the garden...not the coffee table variety but the same quality. Her directions for making a compost pile illustrate her humor. "Much has been written about the use of biodynamic compost starter, and this stuff honestly does make some difference in the speed and quality of your results. Howerev, so does a regular addition of good old urine, either poured on from a collection jar or directly applied, if you have the right personal equipment for the chore. Urine is quickly transformed by the microbes into a sanitary, odorless source of mitrogen, which the composting process requires in quantity. It's cheaper than any store-bought starter and you can never add too much." I highly recommend the book....Carol Cowee

You might want to read THE ORGANIC ROSE GARDEN by Liz Druitt even if you aren't planning on growing roses. Druitt has a wonderful sense of humor. For example, she says the rugosa rose must require a great deal of nitrogen since it has thorns designed to extract human blood. Each of the entries for her list of 100 is written in a friendly, helpful, and folksy way, helpful and not hokey.

Druitt's book contains a handy "Quick Reference Chart for Garden Form" with information organized by height: name; color; fragrance (***); size; repeat bloom; hips; shade tolerance; and Best in zones (4-9). The entries for roses in alpha order follow this chart.

Since ROSES was written for organic gardening, the reader is advised on organic methods. In a section entitled "Getting and Planting Roses" she describes the preliminary tasks the gardener must undertake to ensure she starts with good stock. She covers purchasing, layering, planting in containers and climbing roses. In "Maintaining the Roses" the reader learns about weeding, watering, fertilizing, pruning and seasonal care. In "Trouble Shooting" the author deals with pests. Because this is an organic book we learn about beneficial insects, nectary and shelter plants, and hedgerow barriers (to keep out the deer). Pests include the neighbor's dog (get a fence), fire ants (get the hormone 'Logic'); and other bugs--plant dill, garlic, or get out the hose.

All in all, this book is solid gold for the new or the old rose gardener and I recommend it.

The paperback edition of this book may differ in format from the hardback edition. In the paperback edition, the color pictures are small and of poor quality. Photos intended to illustrate particular techniques (weaving a climbing rose on a pillar, for instance) are simply too small to provide any visual information at all. Not all roses are pictured, which is a drawback in a book that leans heavily on older roses.

There's a good index, which is helpful, because one ends up having to consult it often to pull together information about specific roses. Rather than include all data about zones, shade tolerance, size and more in each alphabetized annotation, there is a cumbersome table cross-referenced by class. Within the annotations, the author includes such observations as "more than worth the wait" and "I think this rose is really cute". Not everyone will find such informality off-putting, of course.

The book is not a useful survey for gardeners in places cooler than Zone 6. Given the constraints of the author's experiences and apparent research, perhaps the book would be of greatest interest and use to those in the author's home state of Texas.

A charming chapter on rose recipes, which really should be contemplated only by organic rose gardeners, concludes the book.

this book is wonderfully illustrated and contains plenty of useful information for the organic grower.the problems i had with the book is that the author spent too much time on garden design and the book was primarily directed to southern growers.

I found this book at our local garden center. It had nearly every rose in it that I was interested it, along with pictures and a description and history of each plant. This would make a great addition to the library of the "Rose Lover" gradener.

This is the best rose guide book that I have seen and suits Australian conditions well. I often recommend it, in fact I bought a little stockpile so I could give it to rosie friends. Liz Druitt has a charming writing style and has obviously amassed a great deal of experience growing these roses. I found the references to how healthy particular roses are especially useful as it is an area often ignored in other books. The only disappointing aspect of this book is the photography which is uninspiring to say the least. Never mind, there are plenty of books with fabulous photos, but good down to earth advice is much harder to come by.

The extensive photos with full description of roses makes this book worth the price alone. I also really liked the pages devoted to the "Quick Reference Chart" that gives each roses' qualities (size, fragrance, color, repeat bloom, etc).

(minor point: Crepescule, a wonderful heirloom rose seems to be missing).

This book is a MUST for every heirloom rose gardener south of the Mason-Dixon line including California of course :-)