December 2023

This park adjacent to the French Quarter is home to the legendary Congo Square and statues of New Orleans’ jazz greats, but a rarely noticed antique rose garden provides an unexpected delight.

– by Ellis Anderson

photos by Leo Watermeier and Ellis Anderson

On a recent November morning, Leo Watermeier is tending the rose garden at Armstrong Park, as he does most weekends.  He lives in the French Quarter, just across from the 32-acre park’s main entrance, so it’s an easy walk to work – not that he sees his volunteer gardening there as a job. Today, Leo’s bending low over the bushes, some of them smothered in bright blooms, spraying a type of horticultural oil on them to help stave off insect pests and a fungus called powdery mildew. He assures us that the concoction is organic and non-toxic.

Scatterings of people wander through the park. Winding pathways and bridges lead strollers around connecting lagoons in the park, designed after the ones at Tivoli Gardens. Tour groups thread through too, guides reciting the history of the Tremé neighborhood and Congo Square, pointing out the historical markers and sculptures along the way.

One passing guide tells the tourists trailing behind her to take note of the lush rose gardens. Leo straightens from his task and looks after them, marveling. “I’ve never heard a single one point out the roses before. That’s a first!” he says.

The gardens, an unexpected delight for French Quarter visitors, are extremely Instagramable, so it’s surprising there’s not more online buzz about the park’s 150 varieties and six different classes of antique roses.  And while it’s not the largest antique rose garden in the country, Watermeier says that it’s one of the largest public collections in the world of warm-weather antique roses.

“You can’t grow most of these in the north, they can’t take temperatures lower than 15 degrees,” he says, gesturing across the garden. “On the other hand, we can’t grow a lot of the old European roses – they need a longer cold period to go dormant.”

Leo leads the way around the north side of the park, naming the different varieties as he goes, reaching out to touch the flowers respectfully, gently, as if they were colorful and fragile butterflies. They have names like Thomasville Old Gold, or Marie d’Orleans or Archduke Charles. Asked how he remembers them all, the former teacher says they’re distinct individuals he’s come to know well, “like kids in a classroom.”

To the uninitiated, these rose bushes look very different from the prissy, manicured ones in estate gardens or in scenes from Downton Abbey.  These are not wimpy plants. Many of these roses would qualify for the NBA of the plant world, with vigorous bodies and long reaches.  Some create vast flowery mounds around the north end of the park, while others climb walls, exploring for new territory to engulf. The honeybees are having a field day in this floral Nirvana.

As he walks through the garden, Leo emphasizes that he is only one volunteer of the group that established the garden and has cared for it the past 30 years.  
“Although the city has been a big supporter of our efforts, not one dollar of taxpayer money has been used for the gardens,” he explains.  “All the plants, gardening supplies and maintenance are provided by the New Orleans Old Garden Rose Society (NOOGRS) and other donors. It’s our gift to the city.”

Leo’s ties to the park began when he was serving as state representative for a Mid-City district and attended the 1980 opening of Armstrong Park.  The city had developed ambitious plans over the years to develop the park as a compound filled with cultural buildings.  Those plans were soon abandoned and the park sat in limbo for several years.

In the late ‘80s, Leo – a private citizen by that time – was part of a team working with Mayor Sidney Barthelemy and other city leaders to negotiate with the owners of Copenhagen’s fabled Tivoli Gardens, legendary for its water features, gardens and music. The idea was to transform the languishing space at Armstrong into a similar theme park. When lack of financing tanked those plans as well, Barthelemy hired Leo as park manager in 1992.  For the next three years, he trimmed trees, replaced lights and kept the grounds in order, learning every inch of the park.

Leo had no budget for plantings in the park, so was thrilled when Maureen Detweiler, who worked in the mayor’s office, offered him five antique roses the first year he had the job.  He planted them in Armstrong and the bushes thrived beyond expectations.

 “I got the bug then,” he admits, laughing about his passion.

Leo began connecting with other antique rose enthusiasts and NOOGRS formed. Maureen Detweiler sketched out the plans for the original garden and Flo Schorenstein with the city’s Parkway Partners program, gave approval for the group to take over a small area in Armstrong.

At first, no one realized how large the antique bushes would grow when planted in an advantageous spot and cared for properly. The roses grew rampantly, wildly, happily. To give them more space, the club applied for and received permission for an expansion in 1999.

Leo calls the garden a “living experiment” that reintroduces the antique roses to the general public while beautifying the park. With each season, the club learns more about the varieties, all members of six different classes.  Leo defined them for us:

• China roses – These are the earliest crosses between the old European roses that only bloomed once annually and those discovered in China in the early 1800s that bloomed repeatedly through the year.

• Tea roses – These roses grow larger than the China roses and in New Orleans, are rarely out of flower.

• Noisettes – This class originated in 1892 in Charleston, South Carolina.  They produce clusters of small, usually fragrant flowers on shrubby upright bushes.

• Tea-Noisettes – These roses are a cross between the two types.  The result is a climbing rose with small clusters of large flowers.

• Bourbons – another early cross with the China roses, usually bearing large, fragrant flowers.

• Hybrid Musks – developed in England in the early 1900s, these arching plants are covered with clusters of fragrant flowers.

For now, novice gardeners who visit Armstrong Park and want to know the names of all the varieties will have to be patient.  Many of the original name tags have “gone missing,” but replacing them all is at the top of the rose club’s 2024 agenda. 

Each variety has a different peak bloom time, but in general, they bloom on and off most of the year except the hottest part of the summer. A winter freeze will stop them in their tracks until late February or early March, but if there’s no hard freeze, the bushes produce larger and more colorful flowers during the winter. 

NOOGRS club members come once or twice a year to gather cuttings from the bushes and once the cuttings are established, the group holds plant sales to “spread them around the city.” The City Park Botanical Gardens also collects cuttings and offers the roses at their own plant sales.

There have been challenges through the years.  Flooding from Hurricane Katrina destroyed many of the plants. High winds from other storms have torn up the plants, severing the tap root and killing the roses. The high heat and record drought this past summer left Leo discouraged as he watched the roses visibly suffer.

“A few weeks ago, we thought we had 150 dying rose bushes on our hands,” he says.  But autumn rains restored the hardy plants and they revived. “It [the damage] wasn’t as bad as we thought.”

Leo hopes that eventually the garden will become a visitor attraction of its own – for both locals gardening buffs and for gardening groups from around the country. When the Heritage Rose Foundation held their annual conference in the city in 2014, Armstrong’s rose garden was the main reason they chose New Orleans.

At the end of our tour, Leo reaches down to straighten one of the name tags beneath a showy red specimen. A sprawling branch snags him and scratches his thumb. He winces, holds it up and a bright drop of blood catches the light.

Then he smiles. “We’ve been known to bleed for our roses,” he says.