The easiest roses to grow for pure personal pleasure are the floribunda types that form clusters of roses.

``Floribundas take the cold weather better,'' says Leon, a longtime member of the Tidewater Rose Society.

If you want to grow great roses, Leon suggests you put them in a bed all together so it's easy to attend to their needs. Roses need excellent drainage so check how your soil deals with water. To check drainage, dig a hole 12 to 18 inches deep and fill it with water. The water should drain out in 30 or 40 minutes. If it doesn't, you have a drainage problem and should build raised beds for your roses, says Leon.

Establish your rose garden with a mixture of one-third compost, one-third sand and one-third topsoil. Work lots of humus into trenches in the bed and not just into small planting holes encircling the rose bushes, says Leon. If you put humus in just circles around the plant and you have a drainage problem with hard clay elsewhere, the water will form a well around your plants' roots and drown them.

Leon makes his own compost with grass clippings, apple cores, banana and potato peelings. The more humus you add, the better, says Leon.

Each spring, Leon also removes all the old mulch around his roses so the soil can warm in the sun until June. During that time, the robins eat any larvae, eggs or insects hanging around the plants. Come June, he mulches with pine straw, compost from a riding stable, pine bark or shredded bark - anything to keep the moisture intact. He sprays every seven days, switching around with various fungicides.

If you want to talk roses with Leon, you can always find him at Wedgwood Garden Center, 1806 East Little Creek Road, Norfolk, where he works full-time six days a week February through Thanksgiving. He's been there 10 years, helping people pick out roses and giving them his rosy words of wisdom.

His favorite roses?

Olympiad for red, Touch of Class for orange-pink, Double Delight for red-white, St. Patrick for yellow, Elina for yellow-white and Bride's Dream for light pink.

``Everyone ought to have a Double Delight,'' says Leon. ``You take one blossom of that to a hospital and you'll get more smiles and nice words about it than anything else.

``There's nothin' prettier than a rose.''

ROSE TYPES

Hybrid teas - long stems, single blooms.

Floribundas - clusters of blooms on small bush.

Grandifloras - clusters of blooms on long stems on large bush.

Miniatures - plants 6-18 inches tall with small leaves and flowers.

David Austin or English tea - smell of old-fashioned roses and bright colors of hybrid teas.

Old garden - noted for fragrance, soft pleasing color and old-fashioned form with many, many petals.

Shrub - rugosas, polyanthas and landscape roses.

Climbers - long canes good for fences, trellises.

For information on local rose societies, see the calendar, page 36.

RECIPES FOR ROYAL ROSES

Feeding roses is crucial. Here is what some local gardeners do:

* Many members of local rose societies use Mills Magic EasyFeed Rose Mix, an organic fertilizer. Locally, it's sold at Smithfield Gardens, 238-2511; Gardens in a Flowerpot, 489-8972. Call Mills Magic, (800) 845-2325; e-mail beaty@wingnet.net; web site: www.millsmix.com

Mary Harrison has 50 rose bushes in her Newport News yard and for years she has given them a spring tonic that gets them off to a good start for the growing season. First she prunes her bushes, then mixes the formula and spreads it around each bush, working it into the soil. The recipe she found years ago in a publication from the American Rose Society goes like this: 1/2 cup bone meal, 1/2 cup dried blood, 3 cups alfalfa meal, 1/2 cup dry wood ash, 1/4 cup Epsom salt, 2 cups 10-10-10 fertilizer and 2 cups cottonseed or soybean meal. She looked everywhere for the alfalfa meal and finally found it at Clark Feed Co. on Big Bethel Road in Hampton. You can estimate how much of each you need by using the rough rule that a pound of the ingredient equals about one pint, she says. Then she puts the roses on two-week feedings of a water-soluble rose food along with fish emulsion added about once a month. Midsummer, the roses get another dose of Epsom salt dissolved in water.