Lehigh Valley Rose Society Inc

Our group is installing a new public rose garden in Center Valley, PA, at the new “Hopewell Park.” This garden will feature 672 roses & 576 bulbs/annuals/perennials. Surrounding the rose garden, a pollinator garden of over 4,000 sq ft will be planted. Our organization is working to have it classified both as a Penn State Extension "Demonstration Garden" as well as a "Monarch Waystation."

The garden is being designed, installed, & maintained by our organization & paid for through donations and sponsorships by individuals and businesses.

Our group will be using the garden for community classes on rose care (pruning, planting, transplanting, fertilizing, watering, disease & pest identification & management, cultivar identification, etc.), public garden tours & garden tours on our YouTube channel. We will also use it as the site for our demonstrations for our YouTube videos, & the place we host member meetings (in spring and summer), as well as the site for our annual picnic.

We operate the “Lehigh Valley Rose Growers” Facebook group - a place for people to share photos of their roses, ask questions about different rose cultivars & help with identification, ask about general rose care, share gardening tips, share about various rose sales/promotions, & more. There are several Consulting and Master Rosarians in the group, as well as some rose hybridizers.

We also established a YouTube channel, where we post videos of garden tours, videos on fertilizing, planting, soil pH, garden pests, etc.

We have a curated a lending library of over 50 books on rose diseases, rose pests, rose identification, garden design, floral arranging, and more - available free to LVRS members to check-out books.

We host rose garden tours to LVRS member gardens, as well as various prominent rose gardens in the Northeast - these tours are available to be booked by LVRS members and the public & serve as an opportunity to educate about roses, the history of roses & rose gardens, etc.

In June 2020, our organization began work with the City of Bethlehem & the Mount Airy Neighborhood Association to help in the restoration of the Bethlehem Rose Garden.

Originally installed in 1931 & maintained by the City of Bethlehem with full-time gardeners, budget cuts over the years led to serious neglect to the roses. No pruning, fertilizing, spraying, watering were done for at least 5 years.

Our organization worked to identify & remove over 100 roses with symptoms of RRD, transplanted the nearly 300 roses remaining (in a garden that used to have 5,000) to space them more evenly throughout the garden, & planted over 200 new roses. Members of our group supplied thousands of hours of volunteer labor, over 50 roses, hundreds of pounds of fertilizer, & use of gardening tools to other community volunteers. We worked with community volunteers to train them with planting, fertilizing, pruning, & watering roses, as well as what symptoms to look out for in regard to RRD.