Rosy fireside chatter

Press, 19 December 1981, Page 18

Rosy fireside chatter

Look to the Rose, by Sam McGredy. Illustrated by Joyce Blake. David Bateman, 1981. 112 pp. $26.95. (Reviewed by Derrick Rooney) In a sense, this book tells more about Sam McGredy than it does about his roses. Anecdotal, discursive, it is more like a natter with an old friend by the fireside or over a bottle of the unique Irish product than the average sort of dry-as-dust gardening book. One of the world's great rose-breeders chats about 50-odd roses that he, and others, have raised. There are anecdotes about the roses, about their breeders, about McGredy himself, about his family and friends, and tucked away among them are some perceptive comments on the directions of rose breeding — in the future as well as the past. It is not quite the book some rosarians might like it to be; though McGredy gives a very good critical analysis of the

performance of almost every rose he discusses, he does not delve too deeply into their pedigrees. Some might feel that though the book is basically about McGredy's own roses and his own opinions about roses, he gives rather too much space to American and Continental breeders and not enough to English ones, such as Jack Harkness, whose “Yesterdays,” for example, marked a significant advance in rose-breeding in the seventies, but gets only a couple of passing references. Still, it is Sam McGredy’s book about his personal choice of roses; there is plenty of meat among the anecdotes; and it is entertaining. It does not, as McGredy points out in the introduction, set out to be a treatise on rose-breeding. But it is a book that no-one who grows or knows roses will want to be without. The illustrations — water-colours and drawings by Joyce Blake, of Auckland — are technically competent.