Beautiful blooms make month of June look rosy

NEW YORK — June is the month when everything comes up roses. All over the country, there are rose festivals, rose tours and rose bushes heavy with blossoms, from Elizabeth Park in West Hartford, Conn., the oldest municipal rose garden in the country, to Portland, Ore., which is nicknamed the City of Roses.

"June is when the first bloom occurs for a good portion of the U.S., and the initial spring bloom is often the most impressive," said Tom Carruth, who in June will become the president of the All-America Roses Selection, the growers' association that tests varieties to find the best new roses.

Portland earned its nickname after thousands of pink rose bushes were planted around the city in 1902, but it has many other reasons to claim the title. The Portland Rose Festival, first held in 1907, celebrates its centennial this year and has organized a History and Roses tour to help visitors find some of the early gardens in cemeteries, at historic sites and in various neighborhoods. The city's Peninsula Park Rose Garden dates to 1912, and its best-known rose garden, in Washington Park, was established during World War I, when roses were shipped there from European gardens to safeguard them from wartime destruction.

Carruth said the garden in Washington Park is "a lovely location on a terraced hill in the center of the city. It's just magical." He added that while roses can adapt to a variety of climates, Portland's cool, wet weather is particularly good for them. "It takes them so long to develop that when they do open, they're huge and the color is really intense."

The Elizabeth Park garden in Connecticut dates to 1904, while the Lyndale Park Rose Garden in Minneapolis, created in 1907-08, claims title to being the second-oldest municipal garden. Donna Fuss, Elizabeth Park's rosarian and founder of the Connecticut Rose Society, said many of these early 20th century gardens were established after new hybrid varieties became available. The hybrids could be planted in flower beds without the walls or fences that older climbing varieties needed.

"The old garden roses, prior to that time, only bloomed once a season, and they weren't very big," Fuss said. "But these new hybrids were big, blousy, showy roses, wonderfully fragrant. People said, 'Let's have whole beds, whole gardens of roses!' Rose mania hit."