Roses of Point Defiance 2025
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.
Below is a curated 4 page list of individual roses by quadrant 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 early 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 many U.S. & Canadian hybridizers. Here’s their 2025 list.
The purpose of this Rose Garden 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 that shows the abbreviations we use to locate & describe each plant. (The 1st column is rose by type; the 2nd column is its color – including scent, and the 3rd one is the number of bushes.)
Here you go – plus a download button to save it as a PDF for your visit to the garden or research at the nursery later on. (Pictures you take to the nursery can also help clear up any uncertainty about which roses you’re looking for.)
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.
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 for her research, data gathering, & graphics talent in making this available to all visiting rose lovers.
