Easy Roses: Secrets for Glorious Gardens- Indoors and Out

Part of the publisher's Garden Style series, this book is indeed stylish, but it's also insubstantial. Brennan (Beautiful Bulbs) offers helpful encouragement to neophyte rose growers but oversimplifies when explaining the how-to's of rose culture. For siting a planting, she stresses the need for sun but says little about water and nothing about air circulation. Giving short shrift to climatic and ecological considerations, she offers airy advice: ``check the hardiness of the rose before buying it''; if it shows signs of disease or infestation, treat it ``as soon as possible with a commercially available spray or dust.'' Directions for inground plantings will be of little use to gardeners outside the Sun Belt. The book's strongest features are its step-by-step instructions for container plantings and such novelties as using roses to decorate a wedding cake. Captions to the lavish illustrations are sorely missing and the cognoscente who stumbles over this lightweight guide will howl at the prominently featured ``classic'' varieties `Fran Druski' and `Dr. Hewey'-known correctly as `Frau Karl Druschki' and `Dr. Huey.' Of interest mainly to non-horticulturalists. (Apr.)