A Year of Roses Book

Stephen Scanniello, rosarian of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's celebrated Cranford Rose Garden, distills his formidable practical knowledge into A Year of Roses, charting month to month the tasks necessary for keeping roses healthy and enhancing their beauty. Scanniello stresses the need for a more hands-on approach to the art of growing beautiful roses. With intelligent simplicity and inspiriting charm, A Year of Roses teaches everything: how to choose, order, store, plant, protect, and maintain your roses. Also included here are practical rose culture information for all horticultural zones, significant historical facts, personal anecdotes, detailed black-and-white line drawings - and, throughout, Scanniello's unique expertise.

Publishers Weekly

An undisputed star in the rose firmament, Scanniello, who is coauthor of Climbing Roses and Roses of America and is rosarian of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is a wonderfully down-to-earth writer. His conversational prose is warm, personable and unaffected, likely to persuade readers that they've been invited to tag along and watch over his shoulder as he makes his daily rounds. Each of the dozen chapters in this calendar-style guide outlines a particular month's chores and sends out shoots to embrace such broader subjects as rose history, pruning, planting and training techniques, as well as environmentally friendly methods of tackling the wide variety of pests and diseases to which roses are susceptible. Generously laced with anecdotes (e.g., his mother's ongoing attempts to foil deer invasions) and practical tips (when planting roses, pop a couple of banana skins into each newly dug hole to provide a potassium boost), the book is a treasure-trove of information, offering riches to experienced gardeners while being of particular use to novice rose enthusiasts, because of the recommended reading lists and the illustrative line drawings.

Sensitive to geography, Scanniello includes information appropriate to a wide range of climate zones, so that gardeners in locations other than the Northeast shouldn't have much difficulty in adjusting the timing of the chores.