Rose Garden

Olbrich's progressive new two-acre Rose Garden, opened to the public in June, 2005, is at the forefront of national garden design trends, moving away from traditional, formal plantings to showcase the Midwest’s finest collection of environmentally-friendly, hardy shrub roses. Shrub roses combine repeat blooming beauty with a tough, resilient nature. Many offer additional ornamental qualities such as fragrance, rose hips, and colorful fall foliage.

Traditional rose gardens feature only roses, with the emphasis on formal garden roses such as hybrid tea roses. Olbrich’s new Rose Garden integrates shrub roses into a landscape of natural curving borders with colorful perennials, waving ornamental grasses, blooming shrubs, vines, and small ornamental trees, as well as colorful spring bulbs. Formal garden roses are contained in two smaller central beds. This innovative Rose Garden helps home gardeners choose the best roses for their own Wisconsin yards.

Prairie Style Architecture

The centerpiece of the Rose Garden’s Prairie style architecture is an accessible two-story stone overlook tower. The limestone tower, with a sharply-peaked copper roof, offers views of the Gardens and Lake Monona. A dramatic entrance fountain has five vertical water jets on either side of a long pool to represent the five-petal symmetry of the rose family. The weeping wall, in the Tower Courtyard, is made up of five natural slabs of limestone. Each stone acts as a mini-waterfall, gently spilling water on the stone beneath before reaching the cooling pool below. As in the rest of the Gardens, benches and wide pathways provide visitors total access and comfortable places to rest.

Shrub roses require much less maintenance than so-called “garden roses,” which include the hybrid tea, grandiflora, and floribunda roses. The formal garden roses require periodic chemical spraying to keep them disease free, and significant labor to cover them each fall so they survive the Wisconsin winters. These garden roses can be frustrating for home gardeners. Shrub roses, requiring no winter protection and little disease management, are becoming increasingly popular for their hardiness and ease of care.

The new Rose Garden also furthers Olbrich’s commitment to integrated pest management (IPM), an environmentally-friendly system of dealing with damaging insects, weeds, and diseases in the garden. This program emphasizes reduction or elimination of pesticides by using the least toxic means of controlling a problem. Gardening with plants that are naturally resistant to, or at least tolerant of, bugs and fungal diseases, such as shrub roses, allows IPM to be used even more effectively.

Rain Garden

The new Rose Garden also features a Rain Garden which ensures that water applied to the garden isn’t wasted. Drain tiles have been installed below the soil throughout the garden. These tiles channel water to a Rain Garden next to the gazebo. The Rain Garden consists of a soil depression surrounded by colorful plants that thrive in very moist soil. Rain gardens minimize the volume and improve the quality of water entering conventional storm drains and nearby streams.