Even though I don't grow many roses (except for a few knockouts), I think they're very beautiful and I love almost all of them! After hearing so much about this disease, I got curious and wondered how people are dealing with it. Identifying rose rosette disease is very difficult, but hopefully this handheld device will make it a little bit easier. I will admit I don't completely understand how raman spectroscopy works, so my explanation may be false or only partially correctly, but I'm still gonna try to explain this anyways for those of you who don't feel like reading the article. If I understand this correctly, a raman spectrometer allows you to get a "fingerprint" of a rose leaf infected with rose rosette disease (and many other diseases as well). You can then compare this with the "fingerprint" of a healthy rose leaf to determine whether the rose is infected or not. Having said all this, I have no idea how much a handheld raman spectrometer costs. Also, I don't really know much about spectroscopy, but I'm wondering if it has to be raman spectroscopy specifically or if other types of spectroscopy can also identify this disease. If you search "handheld spectrometer" on amazon you will find many different ones, but which one specifically would be best for garden use? Hoping someone who knows more about this can chime in. Assuming these devices aren't super expensive, it's encouraging that we will have an easier way to identify this disease. If you'd like to learn more about this, I posted the link to the article below.

https://www.greenhousegrower.com/production/mission-possible-to-get-the-jump-on-rose-rosette/