Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 28, 1991

There are 19,000 rose bushes at the Exposition Park Rose Garden, in 200+ varieties. That’s a staggering amount of flowers, and an unthinkable number of ways to prick your fingers. At its completion in 1928, this was the largest public rose garden in the US. Nowadays it is surpassed only by the Tyler Municipal Garden in Tyler, Texas and the Park of Roses in Columbus, Ohio. 

The sheer quantity of roses at the Exposition Park Rose Garden is impressive, but the enormity of the place is tempered by its grid-like layout. The roses are arrayed in 166 beds, organized into four quadrants, each with a gazebo. A large fountain sits at the center, and a short brick wall surrounds the entire thing. The Rose Garden is almost military in how regimented it is, especially if you see it from above. The even rows of rose beds, separated by parallel grassy walkways, give the impression of both beauty and order. It’s a bastion of nature in an otherwise very urban part of the city.

The Bud 

30 years before the first rosebush was planted, the land that became the Exposition Park Rose Garden was part of a fairground called Agricultural Park, operated by the Sixth Agricultural District Association of California. Attendees at their annual festivals could drink, gamble, hire a lady friend, and watch greyhound races – the rose garden is built on the land that used to be the racetrack, in fact.

Around the turn of the century, a local attorney and Sunday school teacher named William M. Bowen led an effort to rehab Agricultural Park’s reputation and turn it into a public cultural center. Rechristened “Exposition Park,” the complex would include an armory, an exposition building and a museum of history, science and art (the Natural History Museum), all of which were opened between 1910 and 1914. 

The original plans for Exposition Park included a sunken garden at the north end of the property. Roses didn’t figure into it at this point – from 1913 through 1920, the garden was basically a big field of Bermuda grass, with some trees and walkways meeting at a circle in the middle. A plan to build an impressive memorial fountain was scuttled as WWI broke out. 

The Bloom

In October of 1921 the California Association of Nurserymen held a big horticultural exposition at the sunken garden. In the leadup to the event, the Association planted thousands of flowers and trees, and built a circular fountain and lily pond in the middle of the garden. Many of the plantings from the 1921 show stayed in place afterwards. But it would be another five years until the garden as we know it today took shape. 

In 1926, LA’s Parks Department brought onboard “rosarians” George C. Robinson and Fred H. Howard to work with city landscape architects on a magnificent rose garden. The city removed eight inches of topsoil and added the 166 concrete-lined flower beds. Nutrient-rich soil and leaf mold were taken from the canyons of Griffith Park to fill in the beds. They built the four gazebos, added lights to the fountain, and planted over 15,000 rose bushes, mostly donated by local nurseries. The garden was completed in April of 1928, and held its position as the largest public rose garden in the country for 24 years. 

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, the Exposition Park Rose Garden became an important player in rose breeding. As new hybrids became available, they would replace old ones that didn’t fare so well. Exposition Park has also long been a test garden for the All-America Rose Selection (now known as the American Garden Rose Selections), an award given annually by the rose industry to the finest new rose cultivars.  

Hadley Meares writes about two annual traditions inaugurated at the Rose Garden in the ‘50s. In January, when roses lie dormant, the Parks Department would put on a pruning demonstration that attracted thousands of rose fans for a full day of panels, pruning how-tos, even an appearance by the “rose queen” from Van Nuys High. In the summer the garden would host “Camera Days,” where photographers could practice their lenswork with a variety of puppies, kitties and models in gardening clothes, all supplied by the most generous Parks Department. 

Additions

While the layout of the garden itself has remained virtually unchanged since 1928, plenty of non-alive bits have been introduced over the years. To prepare for the LA Olympics in 1932, the city added concrete benches and Greek-style friezes to the north entryway, and art deco lamp posts on the north and south sides. It would have made for an impressive entrance for all the spectators and athletes heading to an Olympics event at the LA Memorial Coliseum or the brand new LA Swimming Stadium, at the southern edge of Exposition Park. 

Sculpture has long had a presence at the Rose Garden, though there’s a strange track record of removals and disappearances. Danish sculptor Thyra Boldsen loaned four of her marble figures to the garden in 1936, one per corner, but in 1968 they were all reclaimed by a descendant. The daughter of sculptor Caroline A. Lloyd donated two of Lloyd’s works (”Repose” and “Poise”) to the Rose Garden in 1946. “Repose” is still there in the northwest gazebo. At some point thieves sawed off “Poise” right above the ankles. All that’s left is a pair of feet on a pedestal. 

They Paved Paradise, Put Up a Parking Lot

Every rose has its thorn, and the Rose Garden had two big ones in the 1980s. In 1980, the NFL Raiders football team – which hadn’t even moved from Oakland to LA yet – somehow thought that nobody would notice if they replaced the garden with a practice field (it never happened). Then in 1986, the LA Coliseum Commission figured that uprooting the garden and plopping it on top of an underground parking structure could be a workable solution to the major parking problems around Exposition Park. The public outcry was swift and effusive, and that plan was sent packing too. Can you imagine anything more purely mean-spirited than replacing seven acres of fragrant flowers with asphalt?

Why a Rose Garden?

California home owners are essentially devoted to gardens and flowers and lawns and roses. Small or large, the front yards of our citizens bespeak the Southland’s passion for seeing things grow. This fact, indeed, has been commented on by eastern journals, holding California as a model State in the outdoor beautifying of its homes. What better demonstration could we give of this rooted love of nature, how better could we justify this well earned reputation than by displaying to our visitors in the heart of our mightiest city the world’s finest rose garden? 

-Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1926 (author unknown)

Los Angeles was expanding rapidly in the 1920s. The oil, aviation and film industries were booming, manufacturing jobs were plentiful, and the population more than doubled during the decade. The new transplants cut across all socioeconomic strata, and there was something for everyone in a new rose garden. 

For normal folk, it was a place of relaxation and safety. Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel, once recalled that the Exposition Park Rose Garden was one of very few places where she was allowed to walk alone when she was growing up there in the 1930s. For those with enough money and leisure time to take an interest in gardening, the garden offered ideas of new varietals to try out at private gardens.

The Exposition Park Rose Garden also fit in with the prevailing “City Beautiful” movement, the urban planning philosophy that cities should strive to preserve their natural beauty, and enhance it with monumental civic architecture. 

Even as the city surrounding the Rose Garden has changed over the decades, the garden itself has remained an oasis – a place to meet up, to take wedding photos, or just wander aimlessly, maybe stop and smell the roses.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Exposition Park Rose Garden’s NRHP nomination form

+Official website (Department of Recreation and Parks)

+Boyer, Edward: “Parking Facility to Go Elsewhere : Rose Garden Will Be Spared” (Los Angeles Times, 1986)

+Libman, Gary: “Rachel Robinson’s Homecoming : She Recalls a Legend and Her Days in L.A.” (Los Angeles Times, 1987)

+Meares, Hadley: “Exposition Park Rose Garden: The Gentrification of Public Space” (KCET, 2013)

+“ROSE GARDEN” (Los Angeles Times, 1926 – accessed via ProQuest)