I took the train to New York city last week to attend a Garden Writers of America meeting at the Queens Botanical Garden (http://queensbotanical.org). Despite the fact that I spent a lot of time in New York city as a child visiting relatives, I have never been sure where, or what, “Queens “ is. I certainly didn’t know there was a botanical garden there.

Queens is the largest of the five boroughs of New York city. It covers over 100 square miles and is actually part of Long Island. The botanical garden is in Flushing, a heavily Asian area of Queens. The garden traces it beginnings to a five acre rose and perennial garden planted for the 1939 World’s Fair. Today, Queens Botanical Garden covers 39 acres of themed areas, gently winding paths and a nationally recognized “green” visitors center and administration building.

We were there to learn about the Garden’s mission of practical sustainability and tour the new Visitor’s Center and Administration Building. Awarded the highest green rating possible, the Leeds ( Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum rating, it is the only public building in the state of New York to achieve this level of sustainability. The building generates much of it’s own electricity through solar panels on the roof. It has a geothermal heating and cooling system and recycles rainwater as well as water used for showers, dishes and hand washing. A walkable garden on the roof helps to capture rainwater for recycling and keep the interior temperature stable.

We spent four fascinating hours talking and exploring buildings and gardens with Patty Kleinberg, the Director of Education. The building is very impressive. I still don’t understand all the technology, but I came away feeling hopeful about our collective abilities to incorporate more sustainability into ordinary living. ( For pictures and more about our visit see http://www.gardenbytes.com/ )

We began the tour of the themed gardens in the herb garden. What a happy bunch of plants! I felt like patting them on the head and chucking them under the chin. I don’t think I have ever seen a greener or more robust hop vine. The clary sage was so big I almost didn’t recognize it. Compost, made by the garden staff, is the secret, a perfect example of sustainability in action.

Over the years, the Charles H. Perkins Memorial Rose Garden has been a point of pride for Queens Botanical Garden. It began with hybridized roses developed by Jackson and Perkins rose growers for the five acre “Gardens on Parade” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. When the fair ended the popular rose garden remained, leading to the eventual development of the botanical garden and the Perkins Memorial Rose Garden.

Today the memorial rose garden is on the move. Trees have grown to shade the original site and, over the years, a high water table has caused increasing disease problems. Those problems, coupled with the botanical garden’s focus on sustainability, have led to the creation of a new home for the old rose garden plus a change in the choice of roses and gardening practices.

By the end of summer the new rose garden should be in place. This garden will feature roses that are nurtured with compost, easy to maintain and sturdy enough to resist most diseases. Roses with historical interest, and many have very intriguing stories, will be featured along with the most modern beautiful, but tough, hybrids.

Back on the train to Boston, I thought about what remains of the original rose garden in Queens. It reminded me of stiffly formal rose gardens I knew as a child, carefully laid out to show off every perfect blossom, like prized teacups in a china cabinet. I didn’t like those gardens then and I don’t now. Then I remembered a woman I had noticed at the Queens Botanical Garden. She was young and pretty, sitting on a little stone bench in the middle of the old formal garden, surrounded with blooming roses. She was bent over, chin resting on her cupped hand, her face close to the flowers. She looked up, smiling. I smiled back. “The roses are so lovely”, she said. And they were.

It’s a four hour train ride from New York to Boston. As I settled back in my seat, my own rose memories began drifting through my mind.

Remembering Roses

A number of years ago, a friend was writing a book about roses. Would I be willing to contribute to it? My immediate reaction was no. I’m not a rosarian, I specialize in herbs. Herbs, their stories and uses, fill my life and bookshelves, not roses. I declined. Then, as I went about my day, rose memories began to creep out of hiding. By the end of the day my head was full of them. Roses had played an important role in my life. I just hadn’t noticed.

Even though my father and favorite uncle were highly skilled gardeners and I have vivid memories of their gardens from my most distant childhood, my earliest rose memories date from 1946, the summer I turned seven. We were living in Washington, D.C. The war was over and so was my parents’ marriage. My mother bought a house on Nantucket, an island 30 miles off the Massachusetts coast. Here, she told us, we would make a new home.

Nantucket was not rich and famous in 1946. It had a stable population of about 3000 people that swelled considerably during July and August, when the summer people came for vacation. We would not be summer people. We were going be year-rounders.

We arrived in June and moved into a 1850’s Greek Revival house on the corner of Lily and North Liberty. The house sat right on the edge of the street . A short, crushed scallop shell driveway led to a two story barn that filled the back of the property. There were two climbing trees, one on each side of the house and there were roses, lots of them. Huge tangled masses of small fragrant roses climbed weathered trellises nailed to the front and driveway sides of the house. A thicket of small white cluster roses with sweet yellow honeysuckle twisting through it scrambled up the front of the house, arching over the front door and reaching for the second floor windows. Dainty pink cluster roses, equally fragrant, blanketed the tall trellis on the driveway side. They came from China, mother said. Gifts from ship’s captains to their wives and sweethearts.

I remember sipping the yellow honeysuckle flowers and burying my nose deep in the pink and white clusters of roses to inhale as much of the delicious scent as possible. I have no memory of ever picking those roses or using them in any way, but their color, shape and fragrance mingled with the scent of honeysuckle are forever a part of me.

Nantucket exploded with roses in June–rambling roses, beach roses and even a few formal gardens of modern tea roses. Siasconset, a small fisherman’s village invaded by Bohemian artists and actors from New York City in the 1890’s, was always filled with visitors admiring it’s tiny, quaint cottages blanketed with rambling roses. The dunes bordering the island’s beaches were covered with wild rose bushes that bloomed pink and fragrant and, by the end of summer, had red fruits that resembled small tomatoes. Somehow we children knew those tomato look-alikes were edible, but we didn’t dare try them. Our school art teacher hiked his students to the town beach each June to paint the roses. Our Girl Scout leaders did the same.

Many of the privet hedges on the island went untrimmed, so on warm June days the beguiling scent of the creamy privet blossoms blended with the rose and honeysuckle fragrance. I remember riding my bike along the cliff road and suddenly entering a pool of fragrant air. I stopped and just stood there, breathing. It was wonderful!

The house across the street from us was owned by summer people. It had a side yard enclosed with a Nantucket-style capped picket fence. Just inside the fence was a perennial border–a flower bed to me. It was the only one I remember ever seeing. The summer lady grew big golden-yellow roses. Nantucket roses were pink or white or red. I thought those yellow roses were splendid. I would hang over the fence to look at them. No one ever gave me one.

We left Nantucket in 1953 and moved to a farming community in southern Ohio. Roses and their fragrance disappeared from my life, replaced by corn, hogs and puberty.

Roses reentered my life briefly on my wedding day. I was in such a daze that day that I never looked at the flowers that were thrust into my shaking hands. When I was told to, I dutifully flung the bouquet over my shoulder and left for my new life. Fifteen years later, when I attended florist school, I remembered my wedding flowers. I had to look at the wedding pictures to see what I was carrying–it was a bouquet of white roses.

Herbs took over my life in 1971. I researched, grew and retailed them. Roses returned as an edible, symbolic, story-filled, fragrant herb. As the herb and dried flower business grew so did my involvement with roses. My staff and I were among the first to experiment with air-drying fresh roses. We designed, wholesaled and retailed an entire product line
featuring roses: rose wreaths, rose pomanders, rose necklaces, rose hearts, rose topiaries, wedding herbs and friendship herbs.

The subject of the first article I ever sold was a churchyard rose garden in Boston’s North End. Created and tended by a gentle Franciscan priest, the garden, dedicated to world peace, showcased beautiful Peace roses.

Today, a variety of roses grow in my gardens. None are prize specimens, but they are all dear to me because of the stories they tell and memories they hold. A Nantucket beach rose, that I now know is a pink rugosa, a Japanese native, grows along the driveway fence. The first rugosa to come to this country was smuggled from the beach in Nagasaki harbor by an early trader, despite his promise not to take anything but goods traded. An ancient eglatine, with long waving canes and vicious thorns, stands by another fence. This is the rose, legend says, that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s castle for exactly one hundred years.

A beautiful, but determined, pink moss rose, the darling of the Victorians, marches around another garden. Delicate and fragrant, the white rose of York blooms once a year as a reminder of my English heritage and my father’s family. A tall, Chinese-red Apothecary rose, in a bed all it’s own, towers over the garden in front of my workshop. A native of ancient Persia, the Apothecary rose arrived in Europe during the Crusades. Widely grown for it’s medicinal use, fragrance value and political and religious symbolism, it was even implicated in a Medieval murder. Tough little miniature roses bloom all summer around a small statue of St. Elizabeth of Hungry, clutching her apron full of stolen bread miraculously turned to roses.

My very favorite, fiercely defended each spring from the resident pruner, is a vigorous, fragrant climber that runs unchecked through one of our old apple trees. In June, when it’s creamy clusters cascade out of the tree and it’s rosy fragrance drifts through the garden, I’m momentarily seven years old again, back on Nantucket, smelling roses.

© Betsy Williams June 2009