By Patrick Butters
Scripps Howard News Service
Reliable Roses: Easy-to-grow roses that won't let you down. By Philip Harkness (Firefly, $19.95)
Rosie/You are my posie
You are/My hearts bouquet
Come out/Here in the moonlight
There's somethin' sweet love/I wanna saaaaaay.
- Al Jolson, "The Jolson Story"
GROUCHO: Baravelli, give me a sentence using the word "cirrhosis."
CHICO: So roses are red, so violets are blue, so sugar is sweet and so so are you!
- "Horse Feathers"
Ah, the rose: the subject of sweet metaphor or object of abject satire. When will it all end? When will this delicate, velvety flower be appreciated merely for itself?
Well, Philip Harkness is willing to take a shot. He's a 30-year member of the conveniently named Harkness Roses, itself an award-winning operation that has been existence for 144 years. His red-rose-covered paperback -- 143 pages filled with splashy photos of variations of the popular plant -- is a handy helpmate to growing roses the easy way.
Pshaw, you say. Roses -- easy? Harkness shows you how, with the help of Steve Wooster's crisp photographs. The author plays on our self-esteem by repeating the word "easy" about a million times. Yet he starts off explaining that it's hard work. One must be willing to put in the time and, more importantly, get to know -- and not fight -- the weather and its effects on the flower.
The chapter on how to buy roses, with photos of what bad plants look like, is friendly and informative. Special offers "are very tempting, but you are buying what someone wants to sell to you, not what you want." It may not be a Honda Accord you are looking at, but the man has a point. As expected, he also has words about the growing cycle and pruning. With the latter, the photos especially come in handy.
The pictures are wonderful, and we get the benefit of Harkness' expertise. He rates flower, plant and foliage properties for each rose, and then gives an overall four-star assessment.
However, I would have loved to have known the history of each flower, especially how each was named.
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