The Rosegarden of Ramón Ortiz

A most depressing sight for all non-plant-affine persons: A rose garden in early spring! Prickly bare sticks sprouting from grey-brown knotted knobs, one next to the other, the very image of bristly boredom. Quite different so for the rose lover: She or he wanders among the plots, reading the signs with avid interest and from time to time sends out deep mental sighs of expectation in view of „Red Mozart“ or „Conquistador“ or „Boule de Neige“. I see names I never read before in any books or on websites. No wonder, since La rosaleda de Ramón Ortiz“ features an important collection of varieties of Spanish roses, and the garden also serves as a test plot to see how these roses handle the Spanish climate.

The gaze travels from base to top, inspecting the expertise of how the stems have been cut, and at what height, it admires the raffia bows tenderly wound around the twines for support and the colours of the first leaves: dark copper, crimson red, emerald green, orange tinted, etc
The rose lover knows some of the names, but there still remain hundreds of floral secrets to dream of.  The garden hosts 600 varieties and 20 000 specimens and as an average gardener one cannot possibley know more than maybe three dozens of them… or?

The “Rosaleda Ramón Ortiz” – who then was the main gardener of Madrid – was created between 1955 and 1956. It is situated in the Parque Oueste, in the western part of the city. There is bird song and the rush of cars on the Paseo del Pintor Rosales, there is a fountain with a white lady spreading her arms under a spruce (or what I take for one). There is a group of young men dressed in blue and yellow overalls chatting at the corner of a long streched building next to the public toilets.

Let us walk up to one of them. His name is Oscar:

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