- The Parnell Rose Festival is back after a two-year hiatus.

After a two-year hiatus (thanks to Covid and Auckland’s prolonged lockdowns), the Parnell Rose Festival is back this month, and the hardworking gardeners are hoping thousands of rose lovers will turn up to enjoy the day.

There is a horticultural gem in the affluent suburb of Parnell that is accessible 24 hours a day. It is officially known as the Dove Myer Robinson Park (named after Auckland’s longest serving mayor), but with 5000 roses in residence yearround, there is no escaping its more common moniker, Parnell Rose Gardens.

The adjacent Nancy Steen Garden also contains a collection of heritage roses while the white garden is a popular venue for weddings.

Now, sure that means anyone can visit and take in its beautifully manicured lawns and soothing million-dollar vistas at any time, but there is one particular point in time to take particular note of this wonderful spot, and that is during the Parnell Rose Festival.

This year’s event promises to be extra special, says Trudi George, Auckland Council’s horticulture team leader and operations manager, who is in charge of “basically anything green” within the area. “This year, we’ve done major work to make sure the festival will look amazing after not having had a show for two years.”

There is a sense that, having been off the events calendar for two years, this year’s festival deserves a special push, so they’ve all worked to make sure all the roses – from the standards and hybrids to old-fashioned and climbing varieties – will look stunning.

That includes putting in 500 new roses, procured from Whanganui’s Matthews Roses (“they are great rose growers who help us out with not just the roses, but advice and tips,” Trudi says) and 70m of garden mix from Daltons for the 98 individual plots.

There are usually two full-time gardeners to maintain the rose garden, but this past August, a team of six experienced greenthumbs was brought in to prune all the roses. “This year, we made sure all the pruners were trained,” Trudi says. “In previous years, if we had less experienced pruners, they’d be teamed up with a veteran, but this year, everyone already had solid experience. Even then, it took us a full month to do the pruning, then another week to put down compost,” Trudi recalls.

And the work is not so much daunting (because of the sheer number of plants) as it is back-breaking, she adds.

All the roses get a good prune, except for the bigger scrambling roses (“we generally leave those to do their own thing,” Trudi says) and all are taken to an open form to allow airflow, in the shape of an upturned hand, with five main stems and buds facing out.

Rose lovers might want to note that members of the public are welcome to take cuttings when the gardeners are pruning – something to keep in mind for August next year! Trudi says that is much more preferable to having vandals coming into the garden in the dead of night to dig out whole plants, something that actually happened recently. This, in addition to an overnight raid last year when all the flowering stems were cut off in one night by a thief who obviously had enough expertise to do the job quickly and efficiently, is a blow to all those who care for the garden.

In comparison to these two-legged pests, the occasional aphid infestation, powdery mildew and black spot are a breeze to handle, Trudi reports. The gardeners keep sprays to a minimum. If sprays become necessary, they focus exclusively on the beds that have aphids, in contrast to the standard practice of previous years when they would spray all the beds. “Mainly, the aphids attack the particular beds that have new, younger shoots, so we watch them carefully.”

The Parnell Rose Festival will be held on November 13 at the Dove Myer Robinson Park, 85-87 Gladstone Road, Auckland. Entry is free, and there will also be market stalls (with an emphasis on gardening and horticulture products).