One of the easiest ways to keep up-to-date on what’s happening in the world of roses is to use Google News Alerts.

Google News indexes more than 4,500 media sources from around the world. The Google News homepage shows only a few of the most popular stories in just a few categories. However, the news coverage is much more extensive and includes dozens of current articles about roses.

Create a good search

You won’t get useful search results if you start with the wrong search terms. Try to be as specific as possible. You can limit your searches:

  • By location: “shrub roses” location:usa
  • By source: gardening source:new_york_times
  • By exact phrase: “pruning roses”
  • By including words: roses and/or clematis — use only one search connector (and or or)

The advanced news search makes creating a complex search easy, but for the most part simple searches work best.

Good search topics include:

  • “climbing roses”
  • “miniature roses”
  • “landscape roses”
  • “old garden roses”
  • “shrub roses”
  • “hybrid tea”
  • “wild roses”
  • “species roses”
  • “David Austin”
  • “Ralph Moore”
  • “zone 4″ gardens — enter your area’s hardiness zone here

Sign up for news alerts

Every search page show displays a small envelope on the left. Just click on the icon to go to the Google News Alerts sign-up page.

  1. Select the type of search: news, web, or both. News works best for me.
  2. Select how often you want to receive email alerts: as it happens, once a day, or once a week. If you have a very specific search, you might want to get results only once a week. If you are writing an article about hybrid tea roses you might want to get alerts as they happen. For most searches, once a day is fine.
  3. Enter your email address.

Google will send you verification email which you must click on to receive the alerts.

Watch your email for the results

Now all you have to do is wait for the email alert to arrive. The email will show the search terms in bold.

News links should be checked promptly because many newspapers only allow free article access for a limited time. Some sources will have (subscription) after them. These sites require registration. I tend to skip most subscription sites because the registration process is so cumbersome. For others I will use BugMeNot as a shortcut.

Google News Alerts make the process of keeping up on news and events in the world of roses fairly painless.