Roses Without Chemicals is great. Peter Kukielski was the curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden for 8 years and serves as their consultant now. During that time stricter legislation on pesticide use forced the rose garden to be more conservative in their pesticide use. Peter was able to take this opportunity to justify renovating the garden and adding many more of the newer, more disease resistant rose cultivars. Over the years he has rated them for their disease and flowering characteristics and presents those summaries with each variety along with a nice narrative about each rose. Many of the roses highlighted are bred/introduced by Bailey Nurseries, and Conard Pyle (Will Radler and Meilland), and Kordes. THere are also some Weeks and David Austin roses and also several old garden roses highlighted. It is fun that besides Will Radler, he highlighted some other RHA member roses too (Jim Sproul and Thrive!, Robert R. and Miracle on the Hudson, and me with Above and Beyond and Oso Happy Petit Pink)!
As a scientist the title made me nervous (without chemicals, 150 disease-free roses). Chemicals / chemistry in my world means studying and working with molecules/atoms and disease-free means no disease. It was nice to see that inside the cover there was a very realistic reflection about how roses can be grown, wonderful experience highlighted with the different roses, and an added level of transparency/integrity in that the author definitely has the credentials and love of roses to be taken seriously in his advocacy and experience with roses.
Peter and I work together on A.R.T.S. and Earth-Kind(R) rose trials and I’m very excited for him and this very timely book that will appeal to beginners to advanced rosarians. It is nice too that this book is affordable at $19.99 to make it relatively accessible to the public!
Hi David, is there any info on rose rust? That is my mayor problem working with Rosa blanda, and to a lesser extent R.
woodsii. I will be at the U library this weekend does any have recomended papers to look at genetics and environmental causes. Johannes p
Disease pressures here are quite different from most places, and I’ve already got a pretty good idea of what grows well locally, so I ordered it to keep up on how roses are doing in locations where I will never grow them. Now that I’ve had a chance to look it over, I’ll offer a quote relevant to people like us.
p. 50 is an easy formula every author can put in his book. Ten is quite restricted as we do not grow/grew and like every possible “toughest and most disease-resistant”.
Were there more grown name ten species would be easier with a lot more consistency among southerners and northerners respectively as many are tougher and more disease res than garden roses.
This book and a few others like Paul Zimmerman’s examplify how roses are changing and that areas where any/all vars can be sold decrease.
It doesn’t look like Peter specifically rates for rust. My suspicion is that they don’t have too much rust. I don’t have too much either. There is a form that seems to propagate on my ‘Lillian Gibson’ and also R. setigera. It would be great if some scientists/breeders in maybe CA would develop a strong program to better characterize the races of rust and resistance sources.
If this is a chalange, I can try. Results will be in more than a year if I am to collect the different genus,species,race. There are a battery of simple tests that I could use before DNA sequencing took over, like chromatography or histology. I hope that others have described method of isolating and infecting.
Am starting with some papers that I found. I may have to ask others for complete papers on rust. EA Allen et al. 1990 is my starting gate. (I have no idea what I am doing).
