This is a fantastic idea. At the moment, I just have a notebook I jot down notes in. Something electronic and organized would be much better

@Elestrial 7a, LOL, I’m a bit of a data geek.

@Markay MD-Zone 7B And a genius!

Wow! Very ambitious. I have a book with dates purchaced and supplier. Im with Fig, for me that ship had sailed

There is a method to my madness and more that a touch of madness to my method!

I’ve seen men at the gym make a notation with pen or pencil in a little notebook they carry around each time they complete a set, but I’ve never seen women do this.

The only spreadsheet for roses I ever used was the one posted here several years ago summarizing Peter K’s findings.

@rifis (zone 6b-7a NJ), uhhh… I also made one of those, but only fir the roses he rated at 50 or higher for disease resistance.

Hee, Hee - what Fig-insanity said. I do have a (cardboard) file in my (metal) filing cabinet which says "roses" on it. Inside of it are, perhaps 1-14 pages of hand written notes, hand drawn (badly) pictures of each of our maybe 10 "places" (some are true "rooms", most are just areas like "along the back fence", "along the street North or South of the driveway", "in the front garden", "in the central bed", "along the sidewalk",etc. in the garden.) These have been written over the years, with lots of scribbles and crossing outs, and replacing names, etc. Not the best way to keep track of our 100+ roses, of course, but I do know that if I tried to make a spreadsheet it would drive me mad, and take WAY too much time to keep up.

Jackie

I have a spreadsheet for all the plants I grow. It's indispensable to me, especially in terms of answering questions like how old is that plant? or what is that plant in that corner I forgot about? I find it useful to pivot the data and filter based on the various factors, so I keep all of the data on one tab and in one table. I sort by current or not current, and then by family, genus and species, and then I use the pivot table to refine further.

Here are my headers:

Family

Genus

Species

Subspecies, varietas or forma

Class

Added (date planted)

Year

Current (Yes or no)

Notes

Rating

@Formerly RBEHS Z10A/S17, I have a notebook with that sort of info scribbled in it, but not comprehensive of everything in my garden and, for whatever weird reason, it does not include roses. It mostly only lists rare-in-commerce (in the U.S. at least) or not-in-commerce plants (a lot of them picked up at Strybing Arboretum's or the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden's plant decks over the years, or grown from seed from off-the-beaten-track vendors) whose names I KNOW I am likely to forget, e.g. Indigofera australis, Bowkeria verticillata, Swainsona galegifolia, etc., and which will be difficult to find on just any old nursery's list, so I figure I need to write them down to save me endless hours of searching. I admire your discipline!

Other than that, I have my list of roses on HMF that I keep updated and, recently, was able to recall when I got some of them by perusing old Vintage and RVR invoices in old emails. Unfortunately, I bought many of them AT Vintage Gardens in Sebastopol when they had a store, not by mail. And then there's the ones I bought at the Celebration of Old Roses both when Vintage had a table there and from others who also had tables....it's a mess. As for any other info about them, beyond purchase date, well, it's all in my head. And I've got a pretty long memory, even for those long since shovel-pruned (especially the ones that were so bad they were eminently memorable).

I keep spreadsheets for other things; I don't know why not for roses -- it's not a bad idea!

I've kept a database/spreadsheet of my roses almost from the start of moving here in 1997 (our first purchased home, and hence, the start of my major rose mania). I used to use MS Works, which was perfect and simple, but it stopped being supported. My last print-out from it is from 2014, and I use that doc all the time for reference. It also has all of the roses I got rid of. Now I use Google sheets, which is fine. My current categories are:

Name

Type

Breeder

Year of Intro

Location in the yard

Source

Date received

Misc.

I also keep a much simpler Google spreadsheet for my daylilies. But I only have ~30 daylilies, and I have ~250 roses. Several years ago, I started keeping a bound spiral garden notebook, where I hand write in what I do... more significant things, not stuff like deadheading or weeding. Things like fertilizing, up-potting, processing, etc. I'm a science person (retired chemistry teacher), so keeping data is natural for me :-D

Edit to add: Fig, I'm 70 and have been avidly gardening since I was 15!

My entire life is on spreadsheets, roses included. Here are my headers:

Name

Link

Type

Breeder

Color

Date

Light Req's

Source

Root Source

Plant size (h x w)

Size purchased

Notes

I keep every single rose I've ever grown here, with a strikethrough if it has died or if I have given it away, along with notes about why so that I don't do it again. Sometimes I have to ask myself 'do I really need another blush colored rose' and then look it up and convince myself that I, in fact, do not.

Taking this a step further, I have the following tabs in my spreadsheet, in addition to this one labeled 'rose list'. I have 'wish list' and 'cuttings', the former for obvious reasons, the latter to keep track of cuttings I have rooted and requests for them.

LOVE THIS!

Yes, I myself keep an Excel spreadsheet for keeping my roses in order and I love that I am in good company here.

My Columns are labeled:

Exhibition Name

Registration Name

Fragrance (Under this column I rate with f, ff, fff, ffff more f's meaning more fragrance)

Name (the one you would find on the tag in the store)

Type

Color

Petal Count

Intro date

Breeder

# of Bushes in my possession

Vendor

Year Added to Collection

Rose Series (Such as Parfuma Collection, Eleganza Collection, etc.)

Garden Location

Awards (I mainly use this to track ADR winners, but also note other awards like Earth Kind, etc.)

Organized a separate section including only the roses I have on order. Here I also have a column labeled Size where I list if it is band, 1 gal, 2 gal. I also list Ship Date and make note of my last frost date for the year. As they come in, I move them to the main body of the spreadsheet.

In the main body, I group by breeder.

Markay I don't track blackspot on paper, but you could potentially use a blackspot column like the fragrance column and not b, bb, bbb, something like that, more b's for more blackspot prevalence. My goal is to start individual score cards for each rose to track blackspot throughout the year as suggested by the Micheal Marriott/Paul Zimmerman RoseChat podcast from last season.

Somewhere along the lines I lost where I used to track rootstock.. not sure where those notes went.. but yes a column stating own root, fort, multiflora... would be nice

@Sunny Mississippi 8a oooh… I need to add a column for series. I like your idea for blackspot. I don’t spray so all my roses get some degree of BS during the season.

I don't keep a detailed spreadsheet of performance over the years or months because that would be exhausting. With over 1000 roses, I do however need a rough set of information about where they are and what characteristics I need to keep in mind. I have rose labels in the ground behind each rose, but those can get pulled out, stepped on, or otherwise illegible and I need a way to narrow down what an unlabeled rose is since my identification of the flower itself is lousy even in my own yard.

I have a Word document for "rose locations" that I update as I plant new roses or dig up roses that have died. On that document is one line for each rose, sorted alphabetically within each of about a dozen beds. On each line is the following information all of which is abbreviated - e.g. DR is disease resistant, blackspot being primary in my zone:

Code for how many times I've planted it, Rose name/notable alternative if needed - color Breeder name rose type (e.g. flori), # hmf "likes", codes for reported disease resistance, hardiness, vigor, blooming power, tolerance for shade/heat whatever is on GW/HMF, and lastly height, and code(s) for where I bought it and year, multiple if repeated.

Here's an example:

R Charles Rennie MacIntosh – pk DA shrub, 41 fav, vdbl, cupped, shade OK, z5b, some BS, 3-5’ LA16/DA26

Or one I can't resist even though clearly it's a wimp in my yard:

6R Koko Loco – coffee/lav Bedard flori, 51 fav, vDR, HT form, 2.5-3’ SW11/C13/14/15/RU19/R23/SHF26

From the last information, which is on the rose tag, I can figure out if it's grafted and on what rootstock (e.g. PL25 is from Palatine so it's multiflora).

I also keep a separate list of the same roses sorted alphabetically so I can search quickly if I'm shopping to see if I already have the rose (easy to forget with 1000 roses). I also have a list of roses ordered by vendor each year so I can follow up in case there are specific patterns of health problems by vendor. I keep a temporary list of those roses ordered for a given year called "New locations" where I've planned which bed the roses will be planted - subject to change of course as I'm actually planting. I also keep a cumulative list of roses that have died sorted by reasons that they died so I can stop myself from ordering them too many times or making the same mistakes again. Well, except for roses like Koko Loko or Honey Dijon where I can't (don't want to) resist it anyway.

It isn't really that much work because once I've ordered a rose, all I have to decide is which bed it's going to go in and cut and paste it onto the rose locations/rose alpha lists once I plant it. I have usually created the lines with the rose-specific information before ordering because it factors into whether I'll buy it or not. Besides, after losing all my roses in 2020 to RRD I already have those descriptions created.

Any other information about bloom frequency or timing or disease is just stored by impressions. I don't do many things as a "right brain" experience so the rose performance and appreciation is notable in being processed that way for me.

Cynthia

@nippstress - zone 5 Nebraska, I laughed when I read that you had a category For how many times you had planted it!

@nippstress - zone 5 Nebraska, kniwing you griw a huge number of roses, I was very interested to read about how you organize the information!

Spreadsheet?......first thought,'must be a heavy weight bed sheet that can double as a bedspread when needed'......yes, I've not yet stepped out of the 20th. Century! You young folks amaze me with your technical savy!

Moses.

I keep an Excel gardening spreadsheet that lists out all the flowering plants in my gardens - one sheet for the front yard, one for the backyard, one for plants that have been ordered but not yet arrived, etc, THe. I track variety, zone, when they started blooming, when they stopped, issues, and color.

I try to mark my roses, but my markers fail. I also keep the invoices from my purchases, which are almost all purchased online, and thumbtack the invoices to a bulletin board.

@Markay MD-Zone 7B, YES! I love spreadsheets! Since I color block my garden, I tab by color. I include: year of acquisition and source, mature dimensions, # of replicates, assigned position with Id on a separate map of all beds. Like you, I catalog year of removal from the garden and reason. I have a legend of symbols as tags for notes (growth state, size to up-pot, change location, removal potential, etc).

I don’t mark disease per se, because if it‘s not tolerable, the rose is removed. Other information is archived well on vetted sites so I don’t include these (hybridizer, year of release, class). This information was evaluated when selecting the rose, rather than functionally managing the individual clone in the garden. In this way, I can keep the spreadsheet lean.

I think many others have shared some great tips on how they manage their collections. I think its great to read the ideas of others, so you can create a tool that’s ideal for you. Thanks for starting this thread!