The Park of Roses has been a Columbus jewel since it opened to the public in June 1953. The park’s signature rose garden features more than 12,000 roses and some 350 different varieties tucked deep inside Whetstone Park. Weddings are a common occurrence this time of year with the roses’ beauty on full display.
As you drive down from High Street to get to the rose gardens, tall oaks, maples and honey locust trees cast their shadow. The seasons enhance their beauty. Time marches on. Families immersed in the park’s beauty embrace each other. Time stands still. The dichotomy is fabulous.
The new playground by the rose gardens is pure happiness. The roses standing at attention are alluring. Friends walking & reconnecting. Dogs wagging. The creek trickling. The river playing peak-a-boo. Your heart flutters.
An abolitionist’s son helped establish the acreage that is Columbus’ Whetstone Park 170 years ago. A local resident 100 years later lead a group to establish the park. Land was acquired, planting and reforestation kicked in. Their legacy is now our joy.
Columbus mayor James A. Rhodes approved purchase of 149 acres in 1944 and converted the farmland into a park for Victory Gardens during World War II. On Memorial Day, 1950, the land was christened Whetstone Park.
Around the same time the American Rose Society was looking for a home and partner to showcase gardens – specifically rose gardens. When Columbus city leaders got wind of this, a Rose Commission was created, and a 13-acre garden was laid out within the brand new Whetstone Park. The American Rose Society moved its national headquarters here six months later.
For local residents, the name Park of Roses is ubiquitous to the park itself.
The sights of the park are both ordinary and breathtaking. The park experience can be relaxing and exhilarating while the calming embrace of nature envelopes you.
For me, a lifelong Columbus resident, the Park of Roses has weaved itself in and out of my life for almost fifty years. We go way back.
FIRST – In the 1970s, while attending high school right down the street, I was part of the boys tennis team who practiced everyday after school on the park’s eleven tennis courts. They were installed when the park opened in 1950, and they had those hard metal nets – more like a fence in the middle of the court.
Those days spawned a couple of life-long friendships. Our memories together are cherished and occasionally recounted.
After I graduated in 1979, Watterson constructed its own tennis courts on school property at 99 E Cooke Rd. Eagle tennis then stepped up its game. They won a couple of boys & girls state doubles titles, a couple of boys state singles titles and a boys team championship in 1991. None being easy feats.
But coming full circle, both Watterson’s boys & girls teams today are back at Whetstone Park because of the new $3 million multi-sports complex that was constructed at the high school in the summer of 2019. The complex did not include tennis courts. The old courts are now a parking lot.
Today, Whetstone Park tennis courts have soft nets.
SECOND – In the mid-1980s I moved back to Columbus after college. My father and two of my uncles decided to form a family co-ed softball team. We played in the Columbus City League on the park’s old softball fields down by the river. Unfortunately, like Watterson’s tennis courts, those ball fields are grown over and now provide practice space for various youth soccer groups.
I maintain fond memories of our family softball team which we named the Hetter Hitters. No championships. A little squabbling. But mostly a lot of bonding with our siblings, cousins and extended family that we maintain to this day.
THIRD – A high school buddy and BWHS tennis teammate got married outside in the gazebo at the Park of Roses.
It was a beautiful day. A couple other of our high school buds (in their corduroy suits) with their girlfriends at the time were there sitting amongst the grandeur of roses. Unfortunately, that marriage didn’t last.
FOURTH – My wife Theresa and our rambunctious coon hound Daisy visit the park often just to walk its grounds. Sometimes up top past the tennis courts. Sometimes down by the river past the ball fields that no longer exist. And sometimes past the beauty of the roses where we occasionally see a wedding party gathering.
The Park of Roses – in my forty nine years of consuming both its physical and mindful spirit & beauty – has not aged. The past, however, does echo its wisdom: Hard work is the path to growth. The bonds you build can last. And life doesn’t always go as planned.
Little did I know back in 1976 that one day in the distant future my wife & I would be strolling by these tennis courts not only reflecting on what was, but marveling at what is right in front of us.
I seemed to have missed that part growing up.
The Park of Roses was selected as one of the top ten places to Admire the Bloom on the Rose in 2006. And it is one of Columbus’s top wedding venues.
In 1974 the American Rose Society relocated to Shreveport, Louisiana where it still is today.
A current list of all roses in the gardens – released on May 17, 2025 – is available at parkofroses.org/visit/roselist.
The best time to view the roses is from mid-June to mid-September.
The Columbus Park of Roses is still one of the largest public rose gardens in the United States.
Sources: Clintonville / Beechwold Historical Society May, 2019; Images of America – Clintonville and Beechwold by Shirley Hyatt 2009; www.parkofroses.org; www.columbusrecparks.com; Secret Columbus – A guide to the Weird & Wonderful by Anietra Hamper; On this Date in Columbus Ohio history by Tom Betti and Doreen Uhas Sauer for the Columbus Landmarks Foundation 2013; Pictures courtesy RJH.