Meet Madame Caroline Testout, if you haven’t already. This is the rose that helped turn Portland into the City of Roses. It wasn’t until 2003 that City Hall officially adopted the name, but there is a long history of roses here.
In preparation for the centennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, in 1905, civic-minded Portlanders engaged in a concerted effort to beautify the city with flowers. They began talking up Portland as the City of Roses, and chose Madame Caroline Testout to line the streets. (It was enough of a public effort that some reacted against it. One man with a gripe wrote in a letter to The Oregonian that there were better ways to beautify the city: prevent littering by making it a crime to leave paper advertising on his step.) But the doubters were ignored, and by the time of the expo, Portland had 200 miles of Madame Caroline Testouts lining the streets. It helps that roses are in season in Portland at least May through October, though they can bloom anytime that the weather stays mild — above 45 degrees.
“They planted thousands,” says Rich Baer, a volunteer with the Portland Rose Society, founded in 1889, and whose own garden has 1,000 roses. “There's a lot of different histories on who was the first person to utter those words. Actually there was a little bit of a runoff; Seattle also wanted to be known as the Rose City.”
Baer suggested the way to know was to look at The Oregonian archive, which is where I ran across the gripe. But roses arrived in Portland long before 1905, and the first reference I could find to the City of Roses was a flowery, rhyming poem by the hitherto unknown poet John MacMillan, who in 1894 called our city the “City of Rivers and Roses.”
Let me know if you’ve heard of any earlier use of that turn of phrase “City of Roses” or have a favorite rose.
