Rooted Nearby: An Unexpected Stop at the Rose Garden

Rooted Nearby is our occasional series highlighting local nurseries, growers, and garden businesses we’ve visited, enjoyed, and feel good about recommending. While Milwaukie Floral no longer has a garden center of our own, we still love helping connect our community with great local places to find plants, garden inspiration, and knowledgeable advice.

Some of our favorite outings are the ones we never actually planned. Our day at Washington Park started out very kid-centric, as most of our weekend days do these days. The plan was simple: playground, picnic, family time. Even Luna got to come along. The rose garden was definitely not on the agenda.

But somewhere along the way, we found ourselves wandering into the International Rose Test Garden, and suddenly we were strolling through row after row of roses. September may not be what you immediately think of as peak rose season, but I was surprised by how much was still blooming. Turns out, the garden’s roses can continue blooming through October depending on the weather, so our timing wasn’t quite as late as I thought. The garden has more than 10,000 rose bushes representing over 610 varieties, which explains why there was still plenty to see.

Of course, I couldn’t resist flexing a little florist knowledge along the way. If you’ve ever wondered why the roses growing in someone’s garden can smell incredible while the roses from a flower shop sometimes have almost no scent, commercial cut roses have historically been bred with a lot of emphasis on traits like long stems, flower form, productivity, shipping durability, and vase life. Somewhere along the way, many varieties lost some of that classic rose fragrance.

For someone who has spent a good portion of her life working with roses, I hate to admit that I had only been to the International Rose Test Garden one other time, and I definitely wasn’t there to stop and smell the roses. That visit was for a lovely reason, a family wedding for one of our longtime clients, but it was still work.

This time there was no wedding setup, no timeline, no flowers to deliver, and nowhere we needed to be. Just the four of us wandering through the garden. What started as a completely different plan ended up being a really lovely surprise, and apparently I needed a reminder that sometimes it’s nice to visit the flowers when I’m not responsible for them.

Plan Your Visit

The International Rose Test Garden is located inside Washington Park at 400 SW Kingston Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97210. The garden is open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and admission to the garden itself is free. Parking in Washington Park is paid and can be limited, especially on busy days. Dogs are welcome in the park as long as they are leashed, which made this an especially easy spontaneous stop for us.

For current garden information, seasonal details, maps, tours, and transportation information, visit the official Portland Parks page: International Rose Test Garden.