Hey, it's Jason here from Fraser Valley Rose farm. Well if you're a beginner looking to buy a rose, there's an information resource
You should know about. All of the experts use it. I use it and the whole rose community knows about it
But if you're a beginner
You might not yet. And that would be a shame because in buying a new rose it's where you should go
It's called Helpmefind roses - a completely user-contributed site
you don't have to pay to use it and
It is like the Wikipedia of roses
It has all the images you need all the data you need on the roses you might want to purchase
I'm gonna take you there in just a second. I'll show you how to navigate the site
It's a great site. Only quibble I have with it is not really mobile friendly
So I'd suggest if you're looking to use it get your list of roses ready and then go to a desktop or a laptop
Or some other place where you have a full screen to play with it's not really great on your cell phone
so before you do that though, I'm going to ask you to consider a couple of things and
make a little list here of the qualities of a rose that you're looking to get
So,
You might want to know before you get on the site and start searching around
What the color of the rose that you're looking for. the color of the bloom if that's important to you
You might want to know the fragrance
You might want to know the size of the bloom that you're looking for or the bloom form
The form of the rose and by that, I mean, the habit of the rose
So whether it's a climber whether it's a shrub the ultimate height of the rose that you're looking for and then any other special
considerations for your site like if you're in a cold winter climate
you might want to consider what climate zone you're looking for or if you're looking for something that will tolerate shade or
Sandy soil or that kind of thing
so get that list ready before you go and then I'm going to encourage you to do one more thing and
I make a mistake when I'm shopping for roses because I have a secret wish list of roses that I've read in books
And I've looked around and I'm I'm looking for those roses and so for me looking for roses
I frustrate myself because I know about all these roses I want to get
But they're not available from the suppliers that I can order from particularly in Canada
I'm a little restricted as to where I can buy
So what I would suggest you do before again you go to the site
and start making a wish list of roses that might not be obtainable in your area is
find yourself a vendor or a supplier that you're
interested in buying from
Get their lists of roses
make sort of a short list of ones you're interested in buying and then you can go to Helpmefind and do the
Research that it will take to figure out if those roses are right for you. So without further ado next scene here
I'll take you through how to navigate the Helpmefind roses site
Okay, here we are on the Helmpmefind web site
And to start I just wanted to say I have no affiliation with this website
I'm not trying to sell you anything if you wanted to go and click the donate button or become a member and it'd be fine with
me
But I don't really have a dog in this fight. It's just a really great information resource. So
First I should show you how to get there up to the top here. You can see in the address bar that it's
Helpemefind.com
/roses/ or
if you get there like most people do you just Google search Helpmefind (all one word)
That should be your first site that comes up
So the way you use the site, there are various resources on here
But the way I normally do it is go over here to plants and once I have my list of plants
so let's assume I've done what I previously recommended and
put together a list from my favorite supplier of a plant that I wanted to look up and
Just to extend the example let's say I was looking for climbers, so I
Found on my favorite suppliers website a plant called Altissimo
And I want to see what that looks like and what it does
so okay Altissimo and Climbing Altissimo oftentimes what you'll find here is that they have
different names for the same roses kind of listed together and these two
Listings here are two different names for the same rose
the data is the same here 109 favorites. Rose is excellent - rating and so on
It's the same for this one here. So it actually doesn't matter which one you click here. And
Once you do, then it comes up with this handy page here, which is really going to give you the information
Exactly what we talked about. It's going to have the color of the robes down here
It talks about its red has a mild clove fragrance
Seven petals on average average diameter five inches. So that's a wide wide bloom large single
born mostly solitary cluster flowered in small clusters
Cupped to flat form blooms and blooms it flushes throughout the season
So that means you got that repeat. What else? It's a climber
So it's a tall climbing rose with the height of seven to 15 feet a width on average of eight feet and other
Things you might want to know about it is that it's Hardy to about zone 5b
can be grown as a shrub if you cut it down every year its shade tolerant and it has
some disease
Resistance there. So that is fantastic and you will know more about the Rose even and we'll dig deep into this one
here you can see that one there shows its parentage and
My favorite part of the site these tabs across the top here
way to talk about
comments from other members, but photos is what I like to do get a good idea of
What it might look like in my garden
Including comments for the people who contributed the photos so you can see there's a lot of information to dig into here
But let's search up another rose. So let's say I'm looking at Altissimo. That was one of my
considerations for a climber and I also
maybe we'll look at Oolka and
Again assuming that's a plant that was available from my favorite supplier
I'm gonna go right here to pull - wow, that's a neat looking rose
So what can I find out about this one here, well it obviously has a lot more petals and
Here it talks about that. It's a very very large
double 17 to 25 on average
Petals old fashioned bloom form it's climbing to a height here about 12 feet. So it's not quite as tall as the previous one and
Skipping over to photos once again and get a good look here that it's color seems to be fairly variable
So it starts out with that bright apricot
Color or maybe a little bit orange and then it looks like it fades down through the paler colors
So that will give you an idea of what it would look like in the garden
the other thing is you can go here to member ratings and
This one here shows where people who have voted this to be amongst their favorites placed their votes on its best characteristics
So for instance it does they say it's quite vigorous. That's got the highest score
Of all of its ratings and it's got a great bloom color, form, fragrance doesn't score quite so well on shade tolerance
so again if that was one of your prime considerations
That would be a hint that it's not going to do so well for disease for shade tolerance. Let's see a
couple more
oops
Go with Laura Ford
Also a climber
But it's a
Miniature climber that might be important to know that it's miniature in this case
Meaning that the flowers are quite small in comparison to regular or other roses
Still grows to about twelve feet and let's see what it looks like
go over to the Photos tab here and
Quite a good yellow and I'm going to scroll through do the next screens until I see
What I'm looking for, which is it actually has tints of pink on it as well. So
Again, that's gonna be something you would want to know if you're considering growing this Rose sort of a pink tinge
I'll show you one final rose here before I
Close up this video and
When I was looking for a rose
To cover my new arbor
Which I built in the backyard and you can see a video on that one on my page. I eventually chose Don Juan
Don Juan is not a new rose. It's 1958
but when I wanted a climber I eventually decided
Was I really like that look
there and
It also it's dark red with a strong fragrance
rose 12 to 14 feet which is pretty much exactly the size of my of my new arbor and
It's Hardy in my climate
house 104 favorite votes so
As I say this is all user contributed. So this is kind of I would call it high on the level of trustworthy information
It's not somebody trying to sell you the Rose that's telling you boy. Is this a great rose?
This is other users who have come along and rated this
You can go to this member ratings
Tab here to find out how this one did what was this highest quality and its highest quality in this case
Looks like it's the bloom color which doesn't surprise me with that dark red
Also it scores
Fairly, well only three points behind on its fragrance which I can attest to and the garden it's fantastic
You can get you can dig down into member comments on the Rose
the references that they've compiled through books and and
Annuals and so on above the rose and so that is fantastic
I'm going to show you one other thing about this site here is
All along here on the left hand side
It has information that they've compiled from other sources again all here they talked about
Member favorites for instance and that's a nice spot to look at because what it does
Is it kind of makes a list?
from top to bottom of all of the favorite roses that they've talked about this one here rates the highest at
369 favorite
Those and which Rose is that?
Well, it's Maidens Blush. It's just that Maidens Blush has all these other names- which is a little confusing
But that's what we do in roses
number three is Abraham Darby which shows up quite a lot in the exhibition circuit and
So on down so it just rates all the roses
almost like
Movies they would rate on Rotten Tomatoes
Where you know sort of those with popularity as well?
But it's actually a pretty good place to start because it gives you an idea of what people's favorite roses are of all times
That will end my video here and
Thank you so much for watching and if you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below my video