A photo of a Master Gardener working in the garden outside the Pulaski County Courthouse appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on May 10 (see arkansasonline.com/515rose). By spreading mulch around, Melody Parsley continued a seven-decade commitment by local gardeners.
The Alexander-Butler Rose Garden on the corner of West Markham Street and Broadway in downtown Little Rock is owned by the county and includes two large semicircular beds of roses and other flowering perennials, including (since 2018) milkweed for monarch butterflies.
Two civic leaders, Virginia Alexander (1907-2012) and Gertie Butler (1910-2007), developed the garden in the 1950s, inspired by the city of Little Rock's 19th-century nickname "City of Roses." (In 2006, city leaders replaced that with "The Rock.") Originally, their garden was just hybrid tea roses, lots of them.
For instance, in the 1980s, members of the Little Rock Garden Club replaced 120 rose bushes, including 40 whose patented names included "Arkansas."
The ladies who tended them had help from county workers and jail inmates, and they needed the help. In humid Arkansas, beautiful tea roses are woefully prone to fungal leaf spot.
In 2010, the volunteers lost their desire to keep up an endless routine of spraying fungicide. The group numbered about 70, but their ages ranged from the mid-40s to 103, with more on the grayer end of that spectrum.
Under County Judge Buddy Villines, the county uprooted every last tea rose, and the volunteers saw to it they found new homes. Then rose varieties and other perennials more appropriate to the climate replaced the spotty hybrid teas. The Little Rock Garden Club stepped away from supervising maintenance; Pulaski County Master Gardeners stepped in.
The garden continues.
Virginia Alexander, then 100, works with others from the Little Rock Garden Club to trim rose bushes Feb. 26, 2007, in the Alexander-Butler Rose Garden next to the Pulaski County Courthouse. Born in 1907 at Scott, Alexander had been tending the garden, partly named in her honor, for 50 years. She died in 2012. (Democrat-Gazette file photo)