Our meeting will start at 6:30PM in room 101 at the Casa del Prado. There will be no Little Rose Show, but there will be a Consulting Rosarian’s Corner with Deborah Magnuson, a Rose Auction and a Raffle. Our guest speaker will begin at 7:00 p.m.

Please bring a refreshment to share!

We are very pleased to have renowned rosarian and hybridizer, Tom Carruth, as our speaker for our November meeting. His topic will be “60 Years of Roses”. Many of us have heard Tom speak before and his information always proves very useful to us.

Also, many of us also have some of the beautiful roses in our gardens which he has hybridized. Tom received a bachelor's in horticulture (1974) and a master's in plant breeding (1976) from Texas A&M University. Since 1976, he has worked in the rose industry in California. From 1987 until early 2012, he was in charge of the rose hybridizing effort as director of research, licensing, and marketing at Weeks Roses.

The broad goal of Tom’s rose breeding was to make the rose a contender with all plants, rather than a fussy queen of the garden. His hybrid introductions stress disease resistance, fragrance, floriferousness, novelty, and attractive habit. ‘Julia Child’ serves as a prime example, achieving a rare worldwide introduction. The velvety deep purple ‘Ebb Tide’ was the first of a real color breakthrough. Tom is the inventor of over 150 cultivars. He has accumulated 11 All-America Rose Selections (AARS) awards in just 14 years. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Luther Burbank Award for extraordinary achievement in the field of plant breeding from the American Horticultural Society.

In 2012, Tom retired from Weeks Roses to take a new role as the E.L. & Ruth B. Shannon Curator of the Rose Collection at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. He is responsible for The Huntington’s 3-acre Rose Garden, which showcases more than 1,300 cultivars and some 2,500 individual shrubs. Tom is overseeing the renovation of the Rose Garden, with a goal to refocus the rose collection to equal the beauty of the other spectacular gardens at The Huntington.

Directions to Casa del Prado, Room 101: The Casa del Prado building is immediately west of the Natural History Museum. Entrances to the Casa del Prado lead to an inner court. The rooms are accessible from the court. Room 101 is downstairs on the east end of the court.