If you’re growing roses, especially as a first time grower, then probably one of your best resources is going to be rose societies. You can find them in almost every major city as well as in many countries around the world. If there doesn’t happen to be a local rose society in your own town though, you can certainly access the websites of many of them to get advice and learn more about your beloved flowers. These organizations can be a great source of information about how to grow your roses, but in fact the work they do goes well beyond just being that kind of resource.

These societies might at first have been founded mainly as groups to encourage and inform local people about how to grow roses in general, however a lot of them have joined forces to function partially as regulators and developers of roses also. At the present they do things like registering names for new varieties of roses, and they help to set criteria for judging the development and shape of the flowers.

The World Federation of Rose Societies (WFRS) is also working with its membership to develop a vast database that will make facts accessible to everyone in the planet, on anything from the distinct varieties, to how to tend to roses, to rose conventions.

These organizations take note of new books about growing roses, and make them known to rose growers in general. They also set up conferences where rose varieties from all over the world can be exhibited and their various qualities assessed, with awards given for the best specimens. These conventions are forums for the exchange of information from country to country, and deal with everything from garden design to the strengthening of roses against disease.

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.

Rose gardening is considered to be a little more difficult than some forms of gardening. But rose plants can transform your garden and you will have fresh flowers whenever they are blooming.