Roses for 

 Amateurs. 



Introductory. 



IN commencing this little work on the Rose, it may be 

 advisable to say why it is undertaken in the face of the 

 existence of so many excellent books on the subject, from 

 Canon Hole's amusing and instructive book, and the very 

 practical and monumental ones by Mr. William Paul and 

 Foster Melliar, down to the sixpenny treatises on the same 

 subject. The object aimed at is to write in a manner that 

 may be useful to the thousands of persons, every year 

 increasing in numbers, who love to grow the Rose for its 

 own sake without any after-thought as to exhibition. Most 

 of the books seem to have this latter as their main object ; 

 the desire here will be to make it a secondary one (for 

 no treatise on the Rose can be complete without it), and to 

 consider especially owners of small gardens, who are 

 oftentimes the most zealous and successful cultivators of any 

 flower that they take in hand, but are too often left out in 

 the cold by writers who seem never to imagine that there is 

 such a thing as limitation of space or means. 



When alluding to the history of the Rose, there is not the 

 slightest idea of taking readers back to ancient days, to give 

 quotations from books that we have never read, or to affect a 



B 



