From Dr. Mark Windham-

 

 

We have a full slate of speakers on rose issues.  Besides myself, other speakers include Alan Windham and Frank Hale from UT Extension, Brent England and Katherine Solo from UT AgResearch and Dave Byrne from Texas A&M.  Dave is head of a $4.6 million grant on rose rosette and holds the Basye Endowed Chair in Rose Genetics. There are two concurrent speaker sessions, but each speaker speaks twice.  There will also be tours of the rose plots going on repeatedly, a poster tent to see more research findings, a tent where people can actually see eriophyid mites (too small to be seen with a magnifying glass) and an ask the experts tent where people can get solutions to their own rose (or other plant) problems.  Since the is the first field day of its type and we do not know how many people to expect, we ended the formal program at noon (we could not give a good estimate of attendance to food vendors), however I will be there giving tours until people go home. We plan to have as much as 30 gallons of homemade ice cream (depending on demand, two 5 gallon freezers will be churning away) for folks to enjoy!  The roses, there are more than 3,500 of them, should be in full bloom as well (although many roses may be sick – rose rosette disease).  Still there will be lots of bloom.  Should be very pretty.