Rose alert! These late spring beauties are the absolute stars of the show as we head into Rose Garden Weekend at NYBG. Join us as we jump into two days of floral beauty, live music, poetry, and more in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. And while you’re here, don’t miss the herbaceous peonies, now at peak color and flaunting their colorful flowers. This is what’s beautiful now.
Of all our collections—some 50 in total—the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is a stand-out in the spring, sweeping into June with a panorama of classic colors. Whites, reds, pinks, and yellows abound, and of our 650 rose varieties, there’s certainly something for everyone to love.
While our Rose Garden Weekend was a huge success, the roses are expected to continue showing off their best sides through this coming weekend at the least, so don’t miss out on their spring bloom! Meanwhile, the herbaceous peonies across from the Conservatory continue to delight everyone who passes by—you really can’t overlook them.
If the Garden wears spring like jewelry, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is our Hope Diamond—and at 80% of the way to peak bloom, this is the time to see it. Our Rose Garden Weekend is shaping up to be a festival of flowers both classic and contemporary, from hybrid teas and shrub roses to the most superlative floribundas.
Stop in all weekend long for live music and dance, plein-air painting, drinks, and talks with the Garden’s top rose experts that’ll set you on the path to a thriving rose garden of your own. You might even win one of our incredible plants to take home—learn more here.
And if you’re not yet sold, have a look at just a few of the flowers in bloom this week.
The Rock Garden and Native Plant Garden have entered their lush summer growth already, so enjoy a stroll in the shade of our tree canopy this Memorial Day Weekend. We will be open on Monday during regular Garden Hours.
Roses come in all shapes, sizes, and colors—some quite different from what you would expect! Follow their progress on Rose Watch as these beautiful flowers approach the peak of their seasonal color.
In September, our roses always look resplendent. We have a special fundraising party that takes place in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden so it looks colorful and immaculate during a time when many other areas in the garden are winding down for the season.
I often have people stop and talk to me about roses when I am down working in the garden on the weekends. Black spot and Japanese beetles are always topics of conversation. Sometimes a visitor is searching for a specific rose—one from childhood or something they have heard about in a story. More often than not, people are interested in good recommendations. With over 600 different varieties of roses, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is an ideal place for the gardener to go window shopping.
Stephen Scanniello is NYBG’s Curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. The author of six books on roses, his latest is A Rose By Any Name. Stephen is the recipient of the Jane Righter Rose Medal from the Garden Club of America. He gardens in Barnegat, NJ.
Shrub rose ‘Alexandra, Princesse de Luxembourg’
During July in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, you’ll find the gardeners and volunteers bent over headfirst into the rose beds filling buckets with faded blooms. We’re deadheading, or as they say in England, “refreshing” the rose shrubs. Deadheading is summer pruning and very easy to do. Simply cut the stem bearing the faded rose to a point where a set of healthy leaves is attached. This is a time-consuming job that will reward you with beautiful new roses in a few weeks time.
There are still plenty of roses to enjoy in the garden. The sweetly scented ‘Alexandra, Princesse de Luxembourg’, a blush-pink shrub rose, and ‘David Rockefeller’s Golden Sparrow’ are both in full bloom. Last week, in Paris, this yellow beauty won the prestigious Gold Medal for Landscape Roses at the International Rose Trials of Bagatelle.
