The rose garden at Balboa Park is a destination in its own right, whether you begin or end your trek around the park. The award-winning Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden boasts more than 1,600 roses in varying colors. The fragrance will make you swoon. To see these roses, walk east over the little pedestrian bridge spanning Park Boulevard. The dizzying array of roses will look like bright dabs of color as you make your way to the garden.
The San Diego Rose Society planted the idea for this one-in-a-million rose garden back in 1969. That year, Dick Streeper made the Balboa Park rose garden, which today locals call it, a high priority when he was elected president of the San Diego Rose Society. As he designed and planned with other rosarians, such as Jean Kenneally and Jim Kirk, he helped everyone to see that the hope of having a rose garden for the public was a very real possibility. With funds provided by Inez Grant Parker’s foundation, the garden became a blooming beauty by 1973.
San Diego has long been considered a perfect place to grow flowers and trees of nearly every kind—especially, roses. Yet when Streeper came into office, a public rose garden did not exist. Four years came and went before the City Council finally was ready to choose a place for the garden.
It takes a community and some time to grow an idea. By 1973, the City Council was ready to choose a site and the Parker Foundation supported the project financially. Several rose producing businesses donated the roses for the initial planting and the members of the San Diego Rose Society potted them up while the walks, raised beds and irrigation system were being made ready. The Rose Society members sowed the seeds of 1,200 rose bushes in 83 varieties.
Over the past decades, visitors to the rose garden may have noticed that the garden has gradually become larger. In the 1980s and 1990s, construction of new Downtown buildings needed a place to discard soil. It turned out that Florida Canyon below the rose garden was the perfect place for that extra dirt.
Every year on the second Saturday of January, the San Diego Rose Society holds a pruning demonstration to educate the public about proper techniques of rose care. Often, there are hundreds of attendees who are there to learn. The Rose Garden Corps and the Park and Recreation Department staff then finish pruning all of the roses. The first bloom in late March to early April is especially spectacular.
Still today, the roses enchant all sorts of visitors to the garden. It is impossible to resist leaning in close to the lush flowers and breathe in their fragrance. One of the most striking roses is the Peppermint Rose. Dark pink and white stripes ribbon through the lush flowers. But the orange, yellow, lavender and, of course, red roses also give flight to the human spirit.
A an extra treat known usually only to photographers is the rose garden’s nearly perfect view to the east, making it a splendid location from which to watch the full moon rising each month. In the summer months, the moon will be in a more northerly position in the eastern sky. To capture a spectacular image, choose the day before the completely full moon rise to get a good image. The sky on that evening will have enough light for you to capture an image of the moon coming up about the same time that the sun sinks below the horizon. The colors of the setting sun will reflect on the moon, giving it a golden hue.
And, of course, the garden is the perfect place for portraits of family and friends. From late March to mid-May the roses are at their peak, but the roses at nearly all stages of bloom will make your heart soar.
