Roses of Point Defiance 2024

When you visit the fully-fenced Point Defiance Rose Garden, you will be greeted by ~1750 rose bushes set in 4 quadrants that are divided by gravel walkways leading to the gazebo. It’s a bit overwhelming and yet a bit glorious . . .

Here is a curated 4 page list of individual roses that should help you enjoy your visit and remember some rose names that you would like in your own garden. Many are still available to buy at local nurseries – but some are less well known and haven’t been sold in decades. If you take pictures with your smartphone and do the research online, you will be able to locate about 60% that are for sale – usually as mail order bare-root bushes in the spring.

Local nurseries are a great resource for the most popular varieties – especially the most recent ones, sold in pots. One of our members owns & runs Raft Island Roses in Gig Harbor, WA, and makes a point of having many of the current year’s bushes from the major U.S. hybridizers.

Part of what we do at the Tacoma Rose Society is wrangle older bushes from gardens where families are selling a house or take cuttings from them and propagate the bushes in our own greenhouses. Old Garden Roses especially fall into this category. Many of the Park’s roses are OGRs and are a delight to see & smell.

The purpose of this list is to keep up with the yearly changes to the garden and give you a reference to locate them while they are in bloom. We’ll start with quadrants 1 through 4, followed by the Legend on pg 4 that shows the abbreviations we use to describe the plant in the list.

Here’s the entire list, plus a download button to save it as a PDF for your online and catalog research during our famous rainy days – or at the nursery later on.

As always, if you have questions about this list or anything else rose-related, get in touch with us here at TRS. Thanks once again to Barbara Lind for her research, data gathering, & graphics talents in making this available to all Tacoma Rose lovers.