Denver’s 118-year-old Fairmount Cemetery is more than just the final resting place for notable Coloradans, including John Wesley Iliff and W.A.H. Loveland. It’s also the spawning ground of some of the state’s hardiest rosebushes.
If you think you can’t grow roses in Colorado, a quick tour through Fairmount will change your mind, says Mary Mastin, a Grand Junction-based master gardener and consulting rosarian for the American Rose Society. “You’ll see which roses have managed to survive in the last 100 years with very little care, not to mention being trampled on or run into with mowers.”
Most of the Fairmount roses are old garden roses — varieties that have been around since the first settlers came to Colorado during the gold rush. They’re hardy and tough, big and bushy. They bloom only once a year and their petals generally spread wide rather than upright. In essence, they’re everything we don’t expect roses to be.
“Most people think of the florist-type roses — the hybrid teas, the grandifloras, the floribundas,” says Joan Franson, Rocky Mountain district director of the American Rose Society.
If the old garden roses are sturdy pioneer women, the florist roses are fickle dance hall girls. But just as these two disparate types managed to coexist in Colorado a century and a half ago, old garden roses and their more delicate counterparts also thrive today. In fact, Franson has grown these and other types of roses in her Arvada yard for more than 30 years.
“I think Colorado is a great place to grow roses,” she says. “Being closer to the sun gives us smaller plants, but more color to the flowers. And the dryness means less disease and insects.”
