Rose Garden
The three-acre garden has gone through many transformations since the Huntingtons' time. It now contains more than 2,500 individual plants and more than 1,300 different cultivated varieties (cultivars). Beyond being a beautiful place to linger, the garden represents an extensive collection enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The spring bloom begins in late March and extends beyond Thanksgiving, thanks to Southern California’s mild climate.
Visitors entering the Rose Garden from the Shakespeare Garden find a winding pathway that leads from a spectacular hillside vista to a recently restored 18th-century French stone tempietto housing a statue entitled 'Love, the Captive of Youth', depicting Cupid and his captor, a fair maiden. Appropriately, the tempietto is encircled by a bed of 'Passionate Kisses' roses.
Each variety in the collection is labeled with its name, class, and date of introduction, offering a wonderful resource for rose fanciers. Visitors love strolling through the colorful beds and arbors, finding favorite shapes, color combinations, and fragrances. The most common question about roses is about fragrance. Even though there are fragrant roses scattered throughout the garden, there are two dedicated beds that contain nothing but heavily perfumed varieties. Visitors can smell to their hearts' delight.
Roses have been a beloved flower for hundreds of years. There are representative varieties from all aspects of the rich history of the rose in the Huntington collection. Beyond a few species, the introduction dates span from 1540 to the present day, including some roses that have yet to be formally introduced. The preponderance of the collection spans the 19th through 21st centuries, a time when the rose reached a pinnacle of popularity.
The Rose Garden serves as an important educational tool to help visitors learn about the versatility of roses. The rose family is the third-largest plant family, offering a broad palette of colors and forms for the home garden. There are many different ways to use roses in your landscape dispelling the misconception that roses are difficult to grow. An arbor-covered pathway from the Rose Garden to the entrance of the Japanese Garden is a particular photo favorite when the climbers are in bloom.
Bulbs and other companion plants are new additions to the Rose Garden. There are more than 120 bulb plantings within the rose beds, mostly of South African origin. These are all bulbs that readily naturalize in the Southern California climate, coming back each season with very little care. Many of them provide color in the garden when the roses are regrowing from their winter pruning.
The entrance to the Rose Garden Tea Room (currently closed for renovation) and the Herb Garden are within the Rose Garden. With all the colors and fragrances of the roses combined with the many perfumes and textures of the Herb Garden, it is a sensory delight that brings visitors back time and again.
The tall columnar tree on the lawn near the entrance to the Rose Garden is Agathis robusta, the Queensland Kauri. One of the oldest and tallest trees in the gardens, it originally stood near the old Shorb estate, and was thought by William Hertrich to have been purchased by Shorb in 1890. In preparation for the construction of Henry Huntington’s home, in 1908 Hertrich moved it to its present location. The tree was then already 40 feet tall. Hertrich recounts a “peculiar problem of transplanting” – the tree had few side roots but a long seven-inch diameter tap root, which was cut five feet below the surface, in effect making the tree one giant “cutting”!
Native to Queensland, Australia, at first glance the tree’s broad leaves would not suggest that this species is a conifer, but it indeed produces cones. In some years such a heavy crop of seed cones form and drop while still green that visitors may spot then on the lawn (and the tree will be thinned for safety).
The canopy of feathery Taxodium mucronatum, another conifer, provides a shady respite southeast of the main rose garden beds. Called “Montezuma Cypress” or “Ahuehuete”, they were grown from seed collected by William Hertrich in 1912 from trees in Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Occurring in scattered sites from Texas to Guatemala, this is a semi-evergreen relative of the Bald Cypress (T. distichum) native to the southeastern United States.
'Huntington's 100th' Rose
A special variety of rose, 'Huntington's 100th', provided a quintessential touch to The Huntington's Centennial in 2019. The pastel yellow and orchid-pink floribunda was hybridized by Tom Carruth, The Huntington's E. L. and Ruth B. Shannon Curator of the Rose Collections, and is on display in the historic Rose Garden, as well as in a dedicated garden just north of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. The hybrid's abundant blooms emit an intense fragrance of lemon blossom with a hint of baby powder. It is sometimes available from the Huntington Plant Sale, and also at local nurseries, sometimes under the synonym, Life of the Party™; they are the same rose.
Rosa 'Huntington's 100th'