Rose Garden

February 10, 2004 - Roses are Ed and ...

Valentines Day is almost here. That time of year when we celebrate love by buying candy, roses, and sexy underwear. Well, if you are looking for a cheap way to get roses, stealing them from the Mission Rose Garden is not an option. There aren’t any roses in the garden - only twigs, sticks, and thorns. You see, in January (every January, every year) gardeners armed with Weapons of Mass Defoliation descend upon the garden to cut everything down to bare root. They take no prisoners and leave no flowers. But in an amazing display of nature, before you can say “Hey Dude, where’s my flower?” the roses magically reappear, just as beautiful as before.

This year will be different because the dedicated staff of edhat.com is on the scene. This year we will be photographing the resurrection on the roses. Each week will post a new picture on our web site, so the residents of Santa Barbara and elsewhere can spy on those little thorny flowers as they sneak back to glory. No surprises this year! We took the first picture last week and the second yesterday. And look what happened. While the rest of us were looking at foreign films and replay footage of the Super Bowl half-time show, the roses managed to pop out a few small leaves.

See our rose garden photo time series (updated each Monday)

The near-bare-root status of the roses yesterday provided fertile ground for counting. The near-perfect weather made the task seem like a walk in the park. Oh yeah, it was. For over an hour, we circled around the flowerless beds clicking our tally counters and reading the signs that identified particular rose types.

The most common rose placement we saw was 10 plants per variety in 2 rows of 5. The biggest exceptions to this rule were the roses along the back wall in the back of the park where each variety only has one plant. The dedicated staff also noticed some cute placement of flowers according to name – Playgirl next to Playboy, Othello and Wise Portia next to Shakespeare, and a row in the front with babyish names like Mother’s Love, Debut, New Beginning, and Pride ‘n Joy.

In all we counted 1495 rose plants and 225 signs. Some signs were duplicates, so we place the total number of rose varieties at slightly above 200. The scrolling text above displays most of them.

Most contestants guessed way too low in the contest. However, a few learned from the Palm Tree count to think big. Schoot, who came closest of all with a guess of 1400, wins free movie passes. American Beauty had something to do with roses, we think.

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