North Bay garden home to thousands of vintage and rare roses dating back centuries
SEBASTOPOL – It's always a good reminder to stop and smell the roses. One North Bay expert takes care of one of the world's largest collections of rare roses.
"They tell a story of an ancient history of human connection to plants and specifically with flowers," Gregg Lowery told CBS News Bay Area. "That role that beauty plays in our lives. Its ability to move us and to make us happy and to inspire us to do crazy things like grow 5,000 roses."
A living museum woven through the hills of Sebastopol is home to thousands of vintage roses dating back centuries.
"This variety is 3,000 years old," Lowery explained, lifting up a pink rose with origins in China. "It's the whole kit-and-caboodle of the history of roses."
Lowery protects and maintains the collection, which he runs through The Friends of Vintage Roses society. He's been preserving the ancient roses since the 1980s.
"I had no training in botany. I learned all those things because I care because I loved the plants," he explained. "I wanted to grow the plants and as I grew, I learned."
Lowery since dedicated his life to caring for the fragrant florals that can be smelled with each gust of wind.
"I'm taking sometimes one cutting off a plant that looks like it might not make it till next year, and hope that I can root that one cutting and I would not say 'well, I'm not going to bother because there's only one' so my chances may not be very good but if there's even a possibility, it's worth it," Lowery explained.
The collection is as storied as the roses themselves.
"People are always giving me roses," Lowery explained, "and I never turn them down."
The collection was flourishing through the early 2000s but took a hit during the 2008 financial crisis when he was forced to close his nursery, and the revenue went with it. But the pandemic gave him the time to refocus and rebuild what is now one of the world's largest collections of a variety of roses.
"It's kind of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. We finish reproducing everything and we start all over and that's to avoid a situation where we lose too many things too rapidly," Lowery explained. "We have nonetheless lost a large part of our collection, probably over 1,000 varieties. Now that we're working with other curators and we're extending this around the world, we are beginning to be able to pull back into the collection things that were lost and then give those also into other people's hands."
With over 3,000 rare roses on his property hundreds more are being cared for across the country, including in Savannah, Georgia where Felicia McManamy adopted part of Lowery's collection.
"What's special about these is they thrive in our environment so it means a lot to me and I hope that I can do a good job and pass it on to the next person." McManamy said in a Zoom interview.
For Lowery, it's a labor of love preserving the past to share it with the future.
"We have to grow plants, even if we're not going to be selling them, we have to keep the collection alive by reproducing it," he said.
A history living on in the roots of Northern California, and shared across the nation.