Tea Roses: Old Roses for Warm Gardens

For gardeners in warmer climates, Tea Roses are a wonder. Evergreen, virtually everblooming, fragrant, with graceful growth habits and beautiful flowers, they are attractive landscape shrubs throughout the year. These minimum-care roses are historic, too, evoking the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in their romantic appearance, names and stories. This book is a labor of love by six Australian tea rose experts, who provide great detail about more than 60 of these roses, most of which are available in the United States. The book is worth owning for the photos alone, but the detailed descriptions and extensive information are its greatest strength, helping the reader to select, grow and identify tea roses (some of which have survived for a century in old cemeteries or at old houses, waiting to be appreciated once again). The definitive book about a great class of roses.

Living in a warm climate I find that tea roses are becoming the mainstay of my rose garden, but alas most rose books appear to be written by rosarians who live in colder climates and focus on European roses I can't grow well. What a delight to find a book about tea roses that covers them in some depth, and to learn about the history of rose growing in Australia. This book is unique in my collection and would be fascinating to rose lovers even in colder climates.

Beautiful book. Excellent condition! Great info on Tea roses, some I'd never heard of before. If you love old roses, I highly recommend this book.

Loved this book. Good pics. Enough roses reviewe. Pick up over and over

This book is an unmatched resource for lovers of heirloom roses. True tea roses, not their descendants the Hybrid Teas, grow best in the parts of the United States with mild winters, generally USDA zone 7 or warmer. If you've ever looked at old pictures with a huge flowering rose covering the porch of an old house, chances are it was one of the roses in this book. Fashion turned away from this style of roses, but interest in them has revived and there are several mail order nurseries that carry them once again. Written by a group of Australian rose growers, it is based on years of research, garden experience, rose collection, and even travel to the United States and elsewhere for study. It is written to be as useful in the United States as it is in Australia. The photographs are sharp, clear, and beautiful. The text is accurate, informative, and wonderfully readable. Reading it, you will feel as though you were having a garden chat with a knowledgeable and humorous gardening friend, and you will turn to this book again and again. And if you live in the right climate, you will soon be surveying your garden to find places to plant some of these glorious roses. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and am surprised to see that I did not do so years ago! I have already purchased two copies, one for myself and one to share.

This book is a terrific resource for antique rose lovers. Unlike most books on old garden roses, this one focuses on a specific subgroup of roses, allowing for more detailed coverage of individuals and of the class as a whole than is usual. But what is really special is the way they foreground their research process: they talk about using old garden catalogs, descriptions from rose shows and societies, paintings, records from plant breeders, and specimens being grown in rose collections today to confirm or dispute identifications of old roses that have become popular in the past several decades. Other writers and researchers have undoubtedly done the same, but they rarely describe those resources in books for popular audiences. In addition, they provide a detailed physical description for each cultivar--things like the characteristics of the the calyx, the prickles, and the length, color, texture, and number of leaflets--incredibly useful information for those trying to perform their own rose IDs. The authors also have an unusually international perspective: based in Australia, they compare the roses sold under the same name in their country, in Europe, and in the US. And, naturally, they grow some roses in Australia that have never made it into US trade, and the pictures and descriptions of these whet the rose lovers' appetite. Despite the difference in hemisphere, rose growers in the southern US will the information in this book relevant. These are roses that need warmth and protection from prolonged freezes, and they are tolerant of drought--qualities as valuable in the southern US as in Australia.

The group of ladies that wrote this book, also known as the "Aussie Sixers" have done a wonderful job of writing this classic book on Tea Roses. Well done, and bravo!