SEPTEMBER 10Meet Stephen Scanniello, rosarian and international authority on roses. The celebrated horticulturist, garden designer and author serves as curator for both the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden and the Helen S Kaman Rose Garden at the Elizabeth Park Conservancy in West Hartford, Connecticut. In addition, he provides design, maintenance, and consultation services for private gardens of notable patrons across New England, the Hamptons, California, Texas, and London. Stephen’s workshops are popular and draw on his extensive knowledge of roses, spanning from practical to obscure, as well as his research on the flower’s rich history, lore, and often peculiar personalities associated with it over the centuries.Stephen has created, preserved, or restored numerous gardens throughout his career, including the Cranford Rose Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Rotch-Jones-Duff Garden and Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Ruth’s Rose Garden on the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed campus of Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, the Heritage Rose District of New York City that encompasses historic sites throughout Harlem in upper Manhattan, the new Heritage Rose Garden at Elizabeth Park established by the Connecticut Valley Garden Club, and the Remember Me Rose Garden in Stoystown, Pennsylvania, dedicated to the heroes of United Flight 93 on 9/11.Since the early 1980s, Stephen has been advocating for the cultivation of roses in an environmentally sustainable manner and promoting practices that reduce the dependence of rose growers on chemicals and pesticides. He is the president of the Heritage Rose Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the collection, preservation, and advancement of research on roses that originated in the nineteenth century or earlier, as well as roses with particular historical, educational, or genetic value. Additionally, he is an advisor to the Horticultural Sciences initiative at Texas A&M, which focuses on research related to Rose Rosette Disease, one of the greatest challenges facing rose growers in America today.
