By Carol Wong, President
It’s November and your lovely roses should be getting ready for their “long winter nap” by your allowing them to set hips. Pulling petals as blooms fade encourages the development of rose hips. Candidates for “shovel pruning” can be dug up and discarded. New roses can be obtained from nursery sales such as at Regan’s Nursery at Highway 880 and Decoto Road, from mail-order, online catalogs, or the Selecting Roses annual sent to ARS members each fall. If you haven’t already done so, joining the American Rose Society helps you keep abreast of history, new developments, rose shows, societies and experts nationally and internationally.
It is with great pleasure that the nominating committee is recommending that the following people be voted into office at the November 21st membership meeting. Stuart Dalton, our newest Consulting Rosarian who gave us a pruning demonstration last January is the nominee for president, Marie Hubbell for vice president, and Jenny Tsao for Director, to take over from Marie who will complete her three-year term in December. President and Vice President are elected for a one year term but may choose to stay in office for a second year. “Stu” Dalton has been a long-time member whose activity again is very welcome.
Don’t worry, PRS needs you, too! Your attendance at meetings and the potlucks, bringing your roses and arrangements to share, participating in pruning demonstrations, pruning at gardens both small and large, and above all, working on the 2018 Rose Show in May are all ways that we will need you. We hope that through doing, you will find others as enthusiastic about our favorite plant as you are. We are all gardeners but our time is sometimes constricted. Roses seem to forgive the most egregious errors, such as having a watering system break or run out of battery power, being drowned by a flooded backyard, or being neglected for a year or two. A good pruning, fertilizer and water, and they can come back stronger than ever.
In October Jolene Adams gave a thoroughly satisfying talk about roses in pots. She covered considerations for light, moisture, drainage, and advantages and disadvantages of various pot materials from ceramic, pulp paper, lined terra-cotta, or plastic resin to metal. She recommended a soil mixture of 30% compost, 30% perlite, and about 30% top soil, but not our native clay if possible. Lining pots with coffee filters or newspaper, lifting the pots above the ground with pot feet, hangers, or stands, and above all not letting pots sit in water in a dish were some of her suggestions.
Our speakers for November 21 will be our own Marian Vanden Bosch and her daughter Karen Flores who will be demonstrating and raffling off their “Holiday Arrangements”. Their arrangements last year were so popular we are having them return.
On the SECOND Tuesday in December, we will be holding our Holiday Potluck and Installation Dinner from 6:00 – 9:30 p.m. at our usual space in the Veteran’s Memorial Senior Center. Our new and returning officers will be installed by our speaker, Mr. Thomas Bolton II, the current site development chairman for the Northern California, Nevada and Hawaii (NCNH) District. Thomas helped the district arrange for the successful NCNH Fall District Conference held in South San Francisco in 2016. As this is a potluck dinner, we will be asking members to sign up at the November meeting to bring a dish for 10. Categories of food are: appetizers, salads, and main courses. We will have a sheet cake for dessert.
Peninsula Rose Society dues of $35 per person are being collected by Membership Chairman Barbara Todd at the November and December membership meetings. Make sure that Barbara has your email address and ARS membership or fill out a membership form with your email address and ARS memberships as well, as both are important. NCNH only has 750 ARS members, which is only 10% of district members. They would like to see that our ARS membership matches our activism in other aspects of roses.
This year’s Fall NCNH conference resulted in many announcements. Star Roses and Kordes Roses have been sold to Ball Industries. It is not known yet what effect this will have on their rose research or sales. Many rose companies are undergoing change.
A nominating committee is working at filling vacancies for offices at the NCNH district level, including District Director, as Joan Goff is stepping down.
There are changes in the Guideline books for horticulture and photography, available on the NCNH website by 2018. A judging school is being considered for spring of 2018 but candidates will need to contact NCNH. An arrangement school is tentatively scheduled for 2/17-18/2018 at the Shepard Garden and Arts Center in Sacramento. “All arrangers should consider attending the school”. An arrangement workshop is being considered on the peninsula.
The PRS board voted to pay for all of our members to receive the district newsletter, The Criterion next year by email address. As you pay for your membership this year, please make sure Barbara has your email address and ARS membership if you are a member.
We will have our last monthly rose show of 2017 on November 21. Although it will not be judged, won’t you try to cut one of your roses to display, and maybe have answered any questions about how to show it to its best advantage? Read Jim Crowther’s suggestions for making arrangements with autumn leaves, Halloween colors, or rose hips and let your imagination find a line, traditional mass, line-mass, abstract or oriental design in which to arrange your roses. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but we learn more each time. It is a relaxing and enjoyable way to show our roses and develop our artistic eye.