What better way to learn rose gardening than with the help of a society devoted entirely to everything connected with roses? Such organizations can be found in many towns and cities throughout the country, and they are a wonderful resource for learning about growing roses. Certainly you can learn much from books or from internet research, but your very best resource will be the rose growers in these societies, with all the experience and information they offer.
These societies may initially have been established mainly as groups to support and inform local people about how to grow roses in general, but many of them have joined forces to serve partly as regulators and developers of roses as well. Now they do things like register names for new kinds of roses, and they help to set standards for judging the growth and shape of the flowers. The World Federation of Rose Societies (WFRS) is also working with its members to create a massive database that will make information available to everyone in the world, on everything from the different varieties, to how to take care of roses, to rose conventions.
That’s another thing these societies do, which is to hold conventions where their individual groups gather to share information about roses. These conferences not only allow rose growing organizations from all over the world to exchange information about growing roses in their own countries, but they provide a forum for exhibiting their local rose varieties too. Awards and honors are given to roses judged the most beautiful or fragrant, and even to those that have been developed to be resistant to certain rose diseases. The WFRS has also begun to honor excellent new books about roses as well.
These organizations devoted to the rose are great resources for flower gardening in general, but they also sometimes sponsor research into diseases and other rose-related problems. So they aren’t just information sources. They are involved in conservation efforts as well as the registration of new and old rose varieties from many different regions of the world. Smaller, more local societies may be mainly concerned just with growing roses, but as they band together and contribute to their national and international counterparts, they become a major force in preserving information about roses and perpetuating them into the future.
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