Sebastopol garden blooms rare historic roses

Up a steep hillside off Petaluma Hill Road and peeking out from a knoll is what might be described as Candyland.

Twinkling amid the barren grass slowly turning brown is an oasis of cheerful color like a roll of Necco wafers -- whites and pinks, oranges and yellows that appear on the hill, delightfully out of place.

This is Susan Feichtmeir's rose garden, a fanciful acre that contains her collection of roses, some 450 varieties in all. Roses cover the raised beds, rise on pillars, cover a gazebo and pergola and spread over the tops of metal umbrellas she calls lollipops. It is a magical sight.

Many of these beauties, showing off their May blooms, are old heritage roses that she collected over the years from Vintage Gardens Antique and Extraordinary Roses in Sebastopol.

So dedicated a customer was Feichtmeir that when the faltering economy dealt a fatal blow to the 30-year-old business founded by Gregg Lowery and Phillip Robinson, she and a handful of other old rose enthusiasts stepped forward to protect the nursery's extraordinary collection of rare old roses.

'Unless someone takes responsibility to maintain old roses, they just go extinct,' said Feichtmeier, who is now on the board of the fledgling Friends of Heritage Roses. 'They go out of fashion and it's such a shame. So you lose such beauty.'

But roses, once established, are not as fussy as many people assume. Left unpruned, they can live for 150 years or more.

Over the years, Vintage Gardens gained a reputation as the go-to place for rare rose collectors cross the country. Lowery and Robinson were among a small and dedicated community of rose rescuers who act as archeologists, beating the brambles as they comb old cemeteries and drive country back roads and historic neighborhoods, looking for ancient roses that have long outlived the person who planted them. They are also detectives, searching through old source materials to try to determine each rose's identity.

'There's this wonderful world of people who love old roses and collect them. They're amateur historians and lovers of beauty and gardens,' said Lowery, who has never lost his passion for finding and saving antique roses for posterity.

Over several decades, the pair amassed a collection of up to 400 varieties, only half of which they were able to identify. From their garden in Sebastopol they cultivated more than 2,000 varieties of antique roses each year.

'Many came from locations in Sonoma County. Ramblers collected from roadsides and burial roses from cemeteries,' said Lowery, who at one time collected about 100 different roses from the Santa Rosa Rural Cemetery alone. Planting roses in cemeteries was an old tradition. Many of these old roses were brought as cuttings to California in the holds of ships or carried in wagon trains by early pioneers.

He and Robinson would take cuttings from the roses they found, cultivate these foundling roses and sell them, trying to get them into as many gardens as possible, including some major public gardens like the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden within the New York Public Garden.

But when the economy collapsed in 2008, the nursery industry fell with it. At the same time, public taste was turning away from showy flower gardening to vegetable gardening and natives. The combination was devastating, not only to Vintage Gardens but even major rose purveyors.

Robinson wanted out. Fortunately however, some friends who want to remain anonymous purchased the Sebastopol property, rebuilt the house with lifetime tenancy privileges for Lowery and then gave a seven-year lease on the rose garden to the Friends group. The last of the nursery stock was sold a year ago.

Numbering abut 300, and headed by Lowery, who also serves as curator, the group helps tend the 2 1/2 acre rose garden, where many of the roses reside in pots. Some of the roses are maintained at other gardens, including the rambler collection, which went to a member with a large property in Willits.

'This is one of the largest collections of historic roses in the country and among the top five in the world in terms of the number of varieties,' said Lowery, who is working with the national heritage Rose Foundation to have it named The National Collection of Historic Roses.

Sunday's open garden at Feichtmeir's is their first formal fund-raiser. Proceeds are mainly to purchase fertilizer, mulch and other supplies. But the group has a larger goal of finding some place — perhaps a winery or a park — where they can establish one if not more gardens filled with their heritage roses.

Visitors to Feichtmeir's garden will see many of these rare roses in a garden that she began only eight years ago after moving to this hillside from Oakland.

She brought 60 roses from her East Bay garden, special ones for which she has a sentimental attachment. The garden includes a few old roses she collected herself, one from her great-grandmother's homestead in Washington and another one collected from her mother's neighbors in Pope Valley. They brought it with them from Monticello, when the small Napa Valley town was submerged to make way for Lake Berryessa in the 1950s.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.