Roses by the Sea at Fuller Gardens

Roses are the main event at Fuller Gardens. Now a test garden for the American Rose Society, it showcases more than 1,200 rose bushes. The 125 varieties have staggered bloom times, so there is color from June until October.

Fuller Gardens began as Runnymede-by-the-Sea, the summer estate of Bostonians Alvan and Viola Fuller. Alvan was a self-made businessman, art collector, philanthropist, and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts in the 1920s. The original landscape was designed by Arthur A. Shurtleff, but the garden evolved and was enlarged over the years, with the help of the Olmsted Brothers firm of Boston. The front garden was designed as the estate’s showpiece in 1938. It was meant to be appreciated from the street and utilized a “false perspective,” in which the back of the garden is narrower than the front, making the space appear longer than it actually is.

The Fullers rarely frequented the garden themselves, but they enjoyed viewing it from the upstairs bedroom windows and welcomed the public. The front garden was planted with hundreds of roses in formal parterre beds, and surrounded by hedges and flower borders filled with coneflowers, astilbe, salvias, baptisia, and geraniums. Statuary and tuteurs draped with clematis punctuated the hedges.

In addition to the front garden, you will find a second rose garden that is laid out in a circular pattern surrounding a central antique wellhead. It is enclosed by a privet hedge and a cedar fence upon which are trained espaliered apple trees. Perennial borders flank the beds of roses.

A shady Japanese garden provides a quiet sanctuary, with paths leading through hostas, ferns, azaleas, mountain laurel, and rhododendrons surrounding a pool filled with giant koi.

Near the remaining carriage house, a glass conservatory houses tropical plants, begonias, and vines. A large display bed of dahlias provides stunning color in late summer.

The gardens are meticulously maintained by a knowledgeable staff headed by director Jamie Colen. The roses are protected from harsh winter temperatures with buckets of soil heaped upon their crowns in early December. Instead of using mulch to suppress weeds, the staff weed the beds twice a week and pay careful attention to soil quality, amending it regularly with compost and lime. As a result, the roses are healthy and vigorous, with few pests and almost no diseases, so chemical treatments are unnecessary. As they age and need to be replaced, new roses are purchased from Roseland Nurseries in Acushnet, Massachusetts. The colorful gardens continue to delight the public as they did almost 100 years ago, and the Fullers are probably happily watching from above.

Roses Bloom at Elizabeth Park

June is the best time for visiting gardens that feature roses, and there's no place better in New England than Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Connecticut - the home of our country's oldest public rose garden.

The property was once called Prospect Hill, the Hartford farming estate of wealthy businessman and politician Charles Murray Pond, and his wife, Elizabeth. When he died in 1894, Charles left his entire estate to the City of Hartford for a public park in his will. The estate consisted of 90 acres and a generous fund to purchase additional land, hire a park designer, and for maintenance. He requested that the park be a botanical park and named after his wife, Elizabeth, who was an avid gardener.

Swiss-born landscape architect Theodore Wirth was hired as the park superintendent, and he worked with the firm of Frederick Law Olmstead to design this new space. Elizabeth Park reflects a combination of both schools of landscape design with European formal gardens and Olmstead's natural setting with serpentine roadways, sweeping vistas and peripheral trees.

The rose garden is the centerpiece of Elizabeth Park, 2.5 acres in size with 475 beds and over 15,000 rose bushes and arches. The arches are in full bloom in late June to early July, and are just spectacular. They only bloom once. Many of the other roses continue to bloom until the fall.

If you visit in June, be sure to see the separated Heritage Rose Garden —one of the few in the country. Also known as Old Garden Roses, Heritage Roses—Albas, Bourbons, Centifolias, Damasks, Chinas, Gallicas, Hybrid Perpetuals, Moss, Noisettes, Portlands and Teas—are extremely fragrant and bloom only in June. These roses are exhibited in raised beds that form a five-petaled rosette symbolizing a centifolia or 100-petaled rose, which is the typical form of a heritage rose.
 

I grew up just a few miles from Elizabeth Park, and have a personal connection to the rose garden. My neighbor and friend Donna Fuss became a stay-at-home mom when her children were born, and developed a passion for gardening, especially for roses. She and her husband Mike planted a small formal rose garden in a corner of their backyard, and as their passion for roses grew, added more and more rose beds throughout the yard. They started entering rose shows, judging, and co-founded the Connecticut Rose Society. Donna’s hobby evolved into a second career, and she became the consulting rosarian to Elizabeth Park Rose Garden. Knowledgeable, outgoing, generous, and funny, Donna became an ambassador for Elizabeth Park - fondly known as the “Rose Lady.” She shared her garden enthusiasm with everyone she met, and I owe some of my garden passion to Donna.

In addition to its rose gardens, Elizabeth Park has several other notable gardens. The Perennial Garden is formal in design, with a central wooden pavilion adorned with Clematis Jackmanii. Enclosed by a hedge of dwarf Japanese yew, the garden features 1,600 perennials arranged in “cool” and “warm” color beds accented by silver grey foliage.

The Tulip and Annual Garden is planted with 11,000 tulips each fall for a spectacular spring display, and features a American Flag in summer.

The Shade Garden features mixed plantings of herbs, perennials, ornamental grasses, woody shrubs, and small evergreen and deciduous trees. Several horticultural groups design, plant, and maintain gardens in the park. These specialty gardens include the herb garden, dahlia display garden and iris garden.

After touring the gardens, you can have lunch at the Pond House Cafe located withing the park. The cafe features eclectic cuisine made with fresh, local ingredients. The menu changes to reflect the seasons.

Elizabeth Park is open 365 days of the year, dawn to dusk, and is FREE to the public. There are no admission fees.

Elizabeth Park is one of the gardens profiled in The Garden Tourist, a book of 120 destination gardens and nurseries in the Northeast, which will be published in fall 2017.