By Carol Wong, President Hot days and hoped-for cooler nights characterize our bay area August weather. Watering our roses and plants is critical, as is keeping an eye on bugs and diseases if we want to protect our blooms. For those of us who are too busy to examine our roses carefully, we are sometimes […]

By Carol Wong, President Seeing more roses and arrangements at our May monthly rose show was exciting. Did you see and smell the huge, incredibly fragrant floating “Sterling Silver” winner by Joann Riggs? We also got to see new roses “New Day” and “All My Lovin”, and the old roses “Baronne Prevost” and “Le Grande […]

By Carol Wong, President Are you enjoying roses at their best in your garden, in the neighborhood or in a public garden? Take time to sniff the rose and jasmine-scented air, admire the working bees, munching lady bugs, and fluttering butterflies. This is such a wonderful time for gardeners. We are plucking out plants growing […]

By Carol Wong, President For our March program, Steve and Diana Stepps illustrated “Building a Low Maintenance Rose Garden” that started with a plan, gopher proofing beds, putting in a drip irrigation system, selecting old and modern roses, spacing them 4 feet apart, and finally planting 150 of them. Improvements included an automatic fertilizing system, […]

By Carol Wong, President “The new introductions are very disease resistant. I can still have beauty and fragrance along with an organic rose garden,” wrote garden designer Dan Bifano in “American Rose”, January-February 2017. In February, our speaker Jolene Adams screened and commented on a wide variety of new rose introductions including hybrid teas, floribundas, modern shrubs, minis, mini-floras, and climbers; […]

By Carol Wong, President Peninsula Rose Society started 2017 with a full water table thanks to rain, and wonderfully enthusiastic new members! Four members joined six older members to help Jerry Georgette prune roses at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Hospital rose garden on January 21. Greg and Erin Chadwell, Dean Chen, Jenny Tsao, and old […]

By Carol Wong, President Between showers I hope you had a chance to go outside, take deep breaths of fresh air, and ponder how you want your roses and garden to look in 2017. The delicious meals of 2016 are a memory. The bronze medal of the Peninsula Rose Society was presented to Priya Kamath […]

By Carol Wong, President Why is it important that we belong to the Northern California-Nevada-Hawaii (NCNH) district, the national American Rose Society, and indirectly, the World Federation of Rose Societies? The World Federation held its 2016 meeting in Beijing, China for the first time. That conference kick-started the Chinese into developing not one but at […]

By Carol Wong, President As the oranges, reds, and yellows begin to color liquid amber trees and sycamores begin discarding their crispy brown leaves, our thoughts turn to what we have accomplished this year and what is ahead in our rose world. The fall flush is well under way. Some roses are covered in blooms, maybe scorched in their […]

By Carol Wong, President Bouquets of roses to Barbara Gordon who substituted for Cynthia Chuang as the speaker for the August 16 membership meeting. Barbara was able to bring an impressive assortment from half of her 170 mini roses to explain how minis were developed, how to grow them, and use them in landscapes. She showed photos of her […]