[.ca] The Rose Bible (ISBN 0811821595)

I am glued to this book! Help!:
"The Rose Bible" is the best and most helpful book on roses I've ever browsed or read. The pictures are magnificient, the language is informative, honest, and humorous, and the history of roses is explained very well. There is a slight bias towards cutting as opposed to garden roses in the top fifty list, but the contents and organization are nearly flawless. No potpourri tips here! If you want to know where roses came from, what is available now (with strong and weak points for each), how to buy, feed, prune, protect roses, and if you don't mind drooling over hundreds of rose pictures in the most undignified fashion, this is the book you want.

Great for the beginner:
Make no bones about it, this book is about roses the author enjoys. This is not a bad thing. He gives you a good concise history on roses, introducing you to the various types of roses grown through time. He gives great advise on planting, pruning and maintenance over the year. Then there are the pictures- lots of them, and beautifully photographed. Yes there is a whole chapter on his favorite roses (many of them tried and true) but hundreds more are referred to with photos and text. This is an ejoyable book, fun to flip through, but still has the information a beginner needs to know when choosing roses.

Absolutely great for Pacific Northwest rosarians!:
This was my first rose related book and it was absolutely magnificent. An all-over great experience. To me it seems mostly useful only if you are in the Pacific Northwestern area or a place where the climate is similar to Reddell's (N. California). If you're looking for a book that covers that area, you can't get any better than this. The book was fat with knowledge and had tons of gorgeous pictures which are always a plus. He catalogues his favorite 50 roses with a page each to their honor. Most priceless was his refreshing honesty with his opinions of roses. He wasn't afraid to show favorites or non-favorites and came right out and said what his experiences were with actually growing in this climate. I absolutely recommend this book to any new beginner in the Pacific Northwest, it covers all the bases.

A good gift book at this price!:
Martha Stewart says it's full of inspired wisdom and knowledge- I wonder if she read it! The pictures are good- but much of the information is found in many other rose books I have in my library. I could part with this book and never miss it- but then again I have a good size collection of Gardening and Landscape books. I suspect that the average person who loves roses would truly enjoy this, especially if it was the first rose book in the collection. Some of the photographs would make great study photos for an art teacher to use to help her students study the structure of these flowers for drawing and painting. Many different types of roses are covered, but only limited information on each is given. This book forms an overview of roses- with beatifull color photographs.