Portland’s love of roses has deep roots

Lily Roby

PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) — Every June, the so-called City of Roses holds a multiweek festival in honor of its enduring relationship with the flower.

Amid celebrations this year, Michael and Gretchen Humphrey walked through their trapezoid-shaped yard in the nearby suburb of Tigard, counting buds and pruning stems.

With around 600 bushes across their property, the Humphreys are some of Portland’s biggest rose enthusiasts. The couple plants and prunes each day, tending their beloved blooms with infectious passion. “There are more colors than you can imagine,” Michael Humphrey said happily of the family garden in a recent interview.

As spring breaks across Portland, roses spill from bushes in a kaleidoscope of color — everything from soft pinks and buttery yellows to deep and velvety reds.

The roses climb brick walls, cascading down highway embankments and twisting through the iron bones of bridges and buildings. More than just flowers, they are a seasonal rhythm and a part of Portland’s civic identity. They’re also the star of the Portland Rose Festival, a floral celebration held each June.

After moving from Colorado in the 1980s, Gretchen Humphrey spent more than 30 years as a public school teacher in the nearby city of Beaverton. She soon learned that the Pacific Northwest’s combination of rich soils, temperate weather and plentiful rain create ideal conditions for a green thumb.

“It was so easy to grow everything,” she said.

Even so, Humphrey felt her garden had room for improvement. “I would go to these rose shows and see these roses and wonder how they grew them so perfectly,” she said. She joined the Portland Rose Society, where she learned pruning techniques, sampled her garden soil’s pH and became fully immersed in the world of rose horticulture. With Michael serving as her mulcher and hole-digger, she perfected her gardening techniques, enrolling homegrown roses in competitive shows across the region.

Before long, Gretchen Humphrey was moving up the ranks of Portland rose society. After quite a few competitions, she became a horticultural judge at the Rose Society’s rose shows, then a consulting rosarian for the Royal Rosarians, the city’s rose ambassadors who also serve as official greeters at the Portland Rose Festival. In 2012, she became president of the society, a position she held until 2017.

A key moment in her horticultural education came early, she says, when she met local celebrity green thumb Mike Darcy, who hosted a gardening radio show for more than thirty years.

“He was so calm and matter-of-fact [and] told me exactly what I needed to do,” she said. “I came out of there going, ‘That’s not hard. I can do that.’ And I did.”

Years of attending shows and helping in the garden meant that soon enough, Michael Humphrey was a rose enthusiast too. Like his wife, he climbed the floral ranks, attending classes and becoming a certified rose judge.

In 2017, at the end of his wife’s term, he became the next and current president of the Portland Rose Society. He also serves as a regional director for the American Rose Society. If Portland is the Rose City, the Humphreys just might be the city’s Rose Family.

In Tigard, the Humphreys’ expansive yard, strategically arranged blooming bushes, now regularly draws onlookers attracted by their vibrant colors and sweet scent.

These days, floribunda roses, a classic variety, grow voraciously along the front sidewalk in the summer. Hybrid teas, which grow with only one bloom per stem and are thus ideal for bouquets, neatly tangle with miniature and fat English roses to create a private garden oasis in their backyard.

If any of these rose terms sound unfamiliar, the Humphreys would be happy to explain them. Visit their flower-filled yard and they’ll gladly cut a rose or two as a keepsake.

“We just want to pick out which one,” Michael Humphrey said. They’re particular about which roses they give away; the best ones are reserved for shows. As both judges and contestants, they take their roses incredibly seriously.

Hosted by the Portland Rose Society, the annual Spring Rose Show was held June 5 and 6 at the Lloyd Center Mall in inner Northeast Portland.

Across several competition classes, hundreds of roses entered to win blue ribbons and gold trophies. To determine the show’s winning King and Queen roses, judges consider form, shape, color, presentation and fragrance.

These days, the Portland Rose Society has more than 600 members. As far as President Michael Humphrey knows, it’s the largest and oldest rose society anywhere in the world.

“The one that was older, in Europe, disbanded a few years ago,” he said proudly. “We put on three different rose shows every year, which is unheard of elsewhere in the country.”

The Portland Rose Society was started in 1889 by Georgiana Burton Pittock, a Portland socialite and the wife of Henry Pittock, editor and publisher of The Oregonian newspaper.

With its wet and temperate weather, the Portland area is similar in climate to the United Kingdom. After vacationing there, Georgiana Pittock was inspired by classic English rose gardens and began hosting her own rose shows at her large estate. But the rose was not without floral competition: Around that same time, the state legislature named the native Oregon Grape the official state flower.

Still, as Portland’s rose shows grew in popularity, the city of Portland garnered increasing attention from the international rose community.

In 1905, in preparation for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition commemorating the arrival of settlers in Oregon Country, hundreds of thousands of iconic ‘Madame Caroline Testout’ roses were imported from France to be planted. Local attorney Frederick V. Holman was tasked with helping the Portland Rose Society spruce up the city.

“If there is space for but one variety of roses, I urge the planting of ‘Madame Caroline Testout,’” Holman wrote in a Sunday edition of The Oregonian in 1901. “It lacks the perfume of the ‘La France’ [roses], but maintains its exquisite pink color, even in the hottest days of August.”

As Holman makes clear, planting roses was a matter of Portland civic pride.

“Portland has not yet a distinct name like San Francisco,” he added. “But we can, if we will give to Portland the name of the ‘Rose City’ during and after the Exposition of 1905.”

‘Madame Caroline Testout’ roses — a soft pink hybrid tea variety named for a French dressmaker — can still be found across the city today, relics of Portland’s past.

This history helps explain why even today, Portland rose culture has a whiff of quaint English-y charm to it. For example: After the city’s “Royal Rosarians” are officially “knighted,” they may accompany the Portland Rose Society president to add “royal water” to roses at special events.

These European traditions no doubt helped settlers feel more at home in rugged Oregon Country. When former Mayor Harry Lane proposed the city hold an annual festival of roses, civic leaders and boosters were enthusiastic. By 1908, the Portland Rose Festival was born.

“People really unite whenever the Rose Festival is happening,” said Kerry Tymchuk, who has studied this history as executive director of the Oregon Historical Society. “That’s when Portlanders really show their love of roses.”

When blooms peak each June, Portland sees a drastic increase in rose-loving tourists. They explore the city’s International Rose Test Garden or private gardens like the Humphrey’s, searching out the perfect photo-op or picnic spot.

Meanwhile, the Portland Rose Festival has remained rich with century-old traditions. There are art walks, a fair and a grand floral parade in which the floats are decorated almost entirely with live roses. A Rose Festival Queen is crowned. This year, Michael Humphrey presented a gorgeous bouquet to 17-year-old Ava Rathi of Lincoln High School.

The festival brings together Portland’s three main rose organizations: the Portland Rose Society, the Royal Rosarians and the Portland Rose Festival Foundation.

Each organization operates independently — but in June, they unite in a show of love for roses and the Rose City. To simplify a bit: The Foundation plans the festival, the Society brings the roses and the Rosarians help with funding and traditions.

“We’re all there and we’re all doing our own thing, but we’re doing it together to support Portland and the City of Roses,” Gretchen Humphrey said. As a gardener, she noted that she doesn’t really do parades. Nonetheless, she helps how she can, nurturing the roses that decorate parade floats.

Portland’s identity as the Rose City dates back more than 150 years. The first record of roses arriving in the region can be traced back to the 19th century, before Oregon was even a state.

According to legend, pioneer women bound for Oregon Country wanted to bring a bit of home with them out west. They stashed rose cuttings within sliced potatoes in an attempt to preserve them for the long journey.

The first documented rose bush in the Pacific Northwest is in 1837. It was likely given to missionary Anna Maria Pittman as a wedding gift.

Settlers started planting roses in their gardens, “and Oregon’s mild climate and fertile soil took over from there,” Tymchuk said. “Today, Oregon is one of the top rose-producing states in the nation, with over 600 acres of roses grown annually.”

These days, rose gardens big and small cover the city. Those include personal home gardens like the Humphreys’ and public ones like Peninsula Park. In the historic Ladd’s Addition neighborhood in Southeast Portland, the district’s unique hub-and-spoke streets meet at a roundabout filled with roses.

None are more famous than the International Rose Test Garden. Located in Washington Park and finished in 1924, the 4.5-acre garden was designed to protect European roses during World War I.

Initially stocked with mostly English roses, it now holds more than 550 varieties. As the oldest test garden in the country, roses have long arrived here from around the world to be evaluated on disease resistance and bloom formation before going to market. Each year, more than 700,000 tourists visit to see the garden’s 8,000 bushes.

The Portland rose community is tight-knit, and over the years the Humphreys have found themselves surrounded by fellow rose-lovers. One of their friends has over 1,100 roses on his personal property. And yet the Rosa genus is so varied that while their friends also grow roses, many have gardens that look completely different from their own.

“That’s the great thing about roses,” Gretchen Humphrey said: “There is something for everybody.”

As the Humphreys see it, there are many other great things about roses, too. The thorny flower brings to mind love, family, tradition. Sure, irises, lilies and tulips offer gorgeous blooms and grow just as easily in Portland, but they don’t have the deep symbolism roses carry.

An ancient symbol for romance, peace and harmony, roses have long been used in Portland to beautify the city and promote tourism.

The flower has been wholeheartedly embraced by Portlanders — and it seems like roses embrace the city right back. For proof, just look at the way rose bushes wrap around buildings in Portland during the summer, thriving in colorful blooms.

“This familial connection, I think, is really strong,” Gretchen Humphrey said of the charismatic flower. Most varieties today, she noted, are part of the plant’s storied history. “People will smell a rose and say, ‘Oh, it smells exactly like my grandma’s roses, or my mom’s or dad’s.’ They’re tied to memories, and it’s incredible.”