Foreword

Mr. A. Norman has a rare distinction among present-day amateur rosarians. He is not only a most successful grower and exhibitor of roses but also one who has succeeded in breeding two of the best red roses of our times. Ena Harkness and Frensham are outstanding by any standards, the one a hybrid tea so shapely and free that it is as capable of winning prizes on the show bench as it is of filling the garden with richly colored bloom; the other a floribunda which seems to have no hidden weakness of constitution or character to mar its popularity. What is really so extraordinary is that Mr Norman should have produced these two winners, as well as other new roses of lesser fame, at a time when professional competition has been at its height. Commercial breeders in the British Isles, Germany, France and America are raising new roses in hundreds of thousands in the hope of getting a few sufficiently good to be worth adding to the lists. Mr Norman with a tiny fraction of their resources, has yet managed to raise two top ranking roses within a few years.

His secret lies in his intimate knowledge of roses and in the care with which he records all his breeding experiments so that he knows exactly what to expect from the parents he selects.

The reader of this book will find the same thoroughness and insight applied to all matters pertaining to the cultivation of the rose. It does not matter whether he is an exhibitor or just a flower lover, an expert or a novice, one who likes to propagate his own roses or buy them ready budded from the nurseryman; Mr Norman tells him how to proceed in a manner so precise and explicit that he cannot fail to understand. It is for these reasons that I believe this to be the best book yet written for the amateur rose grower, and one which can be recommended with every confidence that it will give pleasure as well as instruction.

Rowfant

A. G. L. HELLYER

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