The Rose Capital: How Tyler Became America's Rose City

Walk into the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden on a mild October morning and what you find is staggering in its scale: fourteen acres, more than thirty-eight thousand rose bushes, at least five hundred varieties, including fifty types of heritage roses. It is the largest public rose collection in the United States. But the garden is not simply civic decoration.

It is the monument to an agricultural story that unfolded gradually across the sandy loams of Smith County beginning in the eighteen seventies. The first recorded sale of rose plants in the Tyler area occurred in eighteen seventy-nine. The climate here, warm winters, acid-rich sandy soil, reliable rainfall, turned out to be nearly ideal for rose cultivation.

When a peach blight devastated much of East Texas's fruit industry, many farmers pivoted to roses in the early nineteen hundreds. Large-scale commercial production began in earnest, and in nineteen seventeen the first train carload of Tyler roses was shipped to eastern markets. By nineteen forty-five, more than half the entire United States supply of rose bushes was being grown within ten miles of Tyler.

Approximately two hundred nurserymen, employing fifteen hundred workers, produced between ten million and twenty million plants a year. Smith County alone accounted for eighty percent of the Texas rose crop. Every year, roughly two hundred and fifty refrigerated railroad cars left Tyler, each carrying twenty-five thousand plants bound for the northeast.

The Texas Rose Festival, launched in nineteen thirty-three by the Tyler Garden Club and local growers, put the industry in the public eye, and drew visitors who came just for the blooms. Renamed the Texas Rose Festival during the Texas Centennial of nineteen thirty-six, it crowns a queen each October and fills the city with people who come to see what Tyler has been quietly growing for over a century.