Memorial Rose Garden Planned for Old Post Office Museum

This spring will bring big changes to the Old Post Office Museum property! The Grand Marais Historical Society will be planting a memorial rose garden in the area behind the building, and we invite everyone to take part by "adopting" rose bushes in honor of loved ones, both living and passed on. For a $25 donation, you can select one of the beautiful rose bushes to be planted, and your loved one will be listed in a special display inside the museum. There are over 70 different rose bushes designated for planting in various places in the new garden and in the front of the museum.

View the list of remaining roses available for adoption

Printable rose adoption form

The Roses
The roses selected for the new garden are bred specifically for colder climates. There will be a number of historic old garden roses, cold-hardy climbing roses, shrub roses that grow to 2-4 feet tall, and short groundcover roses that grow 1-3 feet tall. We plan to plant a small experimental bed of hybrid tea, floribunda, and grandiflora roses, using a deep-planting method developed for northern gardens. There will also be a number of peonies, and some perennials such as hosta in certain spots that don't get strong sun. Brightly colored daylilies will help dress up areas along the front of the building. The pillar roses are just that: climbing roses that grow up a pillar rather than on a trellis. Our hope is that this will become a "test garden" for northern-hardy roses, and interested gardeners will come to Grand Marais to see what's growing! We will have several types of roses in the garden:

Dr. Griffith Buck Shrub Roses - Dr. Griffith Buck, who was a professor at Iowa State University, developed more than 80 hardy roses over the course of his career. We're eager to test them in our Grand Marais climate, and hope it will encourage others to plant roses in their own gardens. We have selected 22 of his beautiful roses to plant here.

Canadian Hardy Shrub Roses - thanks to the Ministry of Agriculture in Canada, several dozen northern hardy shrub roses have been developed over the past 30 years. We plan to feature 12 of them in the garden.

Old Garden and Tea Roses - Since the Old Post Office Museum is our museum of Grand Marais history, we will plant several old garden roses that date back many years, even centuries. These will be planted in selected spots around the property. We are also planning to plant two beds of roses that are not normally hardy in our climate, using a special deep-planting method developed by a Canadian horticulturist in Ontario. He has had great success growing roses that are normally too "tender" for our winters. We believe that by using his methods, we will have similar success!

The Garden Plan
The area behind the Old Post Office Museum is basically an empty lot at present, and this sketch will give you an idea of the garden plan. The Historical Society plans to add two eight-foot corner sections of fencing at the back of the lot by the alley. This fencing will look like the fence currently at the Pickle Barrel and is well suited for training climbing or ramblingroses. There will be two artifacts on display in the garden. One is a fish net reel and the other is a small wooden sleigh. Shrub roses will surround these. Two garden benches will be placed so people can sit and view the harbor. A small section of the garden will be reserved for tea roses, which have been grown in cold climates by using special deep-planting methods. The soil in the garden area isn't very good, but we'll improve it before we plant by adding compost, manure, and topsoil.

How to Adopt a Rose Bush
If you would like to adopt a rose bush, there is a printable rose adoption form here on the website. We will honor requests on a first-come, first-served basis, so please indicate a first and second choice, or if you'd like us to pick one out for you, we'll do that. They are all beautiful! As roses are adopted, they will be noted on the photo lists so everyone will know they are no longer available.

In addition to single rose bushes, there will be two corner gardens and three rose pillars (for climbing roses). The corner gardens have both been adopted already. The donation amount to adopt a pillar is $100. This covers the cost of two climbing rose bushes and the pillar itself.

The Historical Society hopes that eventually all of the roses in the garden will be blooming in honor of loved ones. We're happy to bring our community into this project, and the money raised by the donations will help offset the cost of the garden.

If you would like to adopt one of the special areas of the garden, such as the hostas, the hybrid tea test garden, or the daylily garden in front of the building, please contact us via e-mail.

Planting Schedule
We are ordering the roses now from growers around the country so we can be sure to get the varieties we need. When the snow is gone for good, we'll lay out the beds and get busy improving the soil. Some excavating will be necessary. The corner fence will be installed, and if all goes well, we should begin planting roses by the end of May, maybe sooner. The rose garden will be a part of the Garden Tour in June, but it will be a "Work in Progress". This is an exciting venture for the Historical Society and we've already received a lot of enthusiastic support. We hope you'll enjoy watching the rose garden take shape this spring and summer!