I don’t grow a lot of roses, just a few favorites, but birds plant the occasional multiflora rose seed here and there around the garden. One of the resulting seedlings looked really strange when I noticed while weeding in an out-of-the-way spot the other day. It was all disfigured, and red, and—uh-oh—rose rosette disease comes to my corner of Nowheresville.
I hear from a lot of you who have encountered rose rosette disease not on some weed as I did, but on your prized rose bushes. I invited research scientist Christina King of Star Roses and Plants—known for more than a century for many favorite garden plants, including the most popular roses today, the Knockout series—to explain what this disease is all about, and what promise lies ahead for fighting it. 
I’m on my third generation of seed-starting lights, a journey that began back in the day when shop lights with so-called cool-white and warm-white...
We gardeners all know the experience of loss: of plants that don’t make it, for one reason or another—from a tomato felled by disease...
Today we’re going to do some pruning, but not the same old straight-forward kind. Instead we’re going to talk topiary, and its transformative powers...