There are times in life when you need to stop and smell the roses. Luckily, that’s precisely what you can do at the Elizabeth Park Conservancy in West Hartford, Connecticut. Located a few miles from Connecticut’s Old State House, an eclectic oddities museum, it’s also known simply as Elizabeth Park. This New England gem has been welcoming visitors since 1897 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Even more impressively, it features the oldest public rose garden in the country: Helen S Kaman Rose Garden. Dating back to 1904, it is a flourishing fragrant paradise. Home to more than 15,000 rose bushes, one individual on Google described the garden as, “Exquisite, peaceful, sublime!”
If that wasn’t romantic enough, Elizabeth Park’s charming past will surely make you swoon. The site that is now Elizabeth Park was once a farm that belonged to Charles Murray Pond, a prominent figure in 19th-century Hartford. Upon his death in 1894, Pond bestowed this land to Hartford to use as a green space. The city of Hartford agreed, and Elizabeth Park, named at Pond’s request to commemorate his late wife, was born.
The stunningly beautiful rose garden came a few years later, courtesy of Theodore Wirth, who was then Hartford’s Superintendent of Parks. Although Wirth died in 1949, his legacy lives on. Notably, he’s responsible for the rose garden’s now iconic rose arches, which can only be described as ethereal. But where does the name Helen S Kaman come in? This was the Elizabeth Park Conservancy’s first president, who aided in restoring the rose garden in the late 1970s. One thing is for sure: you won’t want to miss out on seeing the roses in bloom.