United States

Dr. Malcolm Manners is a Professor of Horticultural Science at Florida Southern College, where he teaches courses in general horticulture, tropical fruits, horticultural pests and diseases, plant physiology, and plant nutrition.

He was born in Pennsylvania. The family moved to Florida when he was 11 years old. He earned the bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Anderson College (Indiana), then the M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Florida, majoring in horticulture (tropical fruit physiology). He started teaching at Florida Southern College in 1981 and has been there ever since.

Since 1984, he has managed FSC’s rose mosaic virus heat therapy program, which cures roses of virus disease and makes the healthy propagating material available to the nursery industry. In conjunction with that program, he manages a collection of approximately 260 rose varieties, in two campus gardens and the college greenhouses. Most of the certified mosaic-free old garden roses now grown in the U.S. came through the Florida Southern program.

In 1990, he imported a collection of Bermuda's "mystery roses," and it is from FSC's gardens that much of the U.S. stock of those roses has been propagated. He has also worked closely with molecular biologist Dr. Nancy Morvillo at Florida Southern, researching the relationships of various roses, especially the older Noisettes, with DNA analysis.

For the past several years, his classes have propagated roses for the New York Heritage Rose District, and on five occasions, he took groups of FSC students to New York to help plant the roses and train children in propagation techniques.

He has been growing roses for nearly 35 years, mostly old garden rose types, but some modern roses as well. He serves as a trustee of the Heritage Rose Foundation, and has served on the American Rose Society’s committees on rose registrations and rose classification, and the old garden rose committee. He is also active in the Central Florida Heritage Rose Society.

In addition to teaching horticulture in the USA, he frequently volunteers through USAID's Farmer-to-Farmer program, training growers of fruits and other crops in some of the world's poorest regions.

Very experienced (50 years)

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Last visit: Saturday, November 9th