With a little help from its friends, Loose Park rose garden blooms anew

After days of rain last week, the rose garden at Loose Park looked a little beat up. Heavy, waterlogged blossoms hung their pretty little heads as if in shame. Delicate petals torn off by the showers littered the dark mulch under the bushes.

Then the cavalry arrived in green aprons.

Every Thursday morning, members of the Kansas City Rose Society groom the garden for weekend activities, and since this is June, that means back-to-back-to-back weddings.

Most brides never see the volunteer army that spends hours stooped over bushes and reaching into thorny climbers, cutting away all the spent blooms and dead leaves in the Laura Conyers Smith Municipal Rose Garden.

“They are a real gift to us,” says Judy Penner, director of Loose Park for Kansas City Parks and Recreation, which is responsible for maintaining the garden.

The garden has existed since 1931, and it is safe to say that it has been years since it has looked this good, now that a 14-year, $2 million restoration is complete.

“If you’re walking in the garden, everything you see or touch is either new or has been restored,” says Sandy Campuzano, the rose society’s past president and current secretary. She spearheaded the drive to pay for the face-lift.

The money came from “hundreds and hundreds of donors who gave from $1 to $100,000,” says Campuzano, who lives in Prairie Village. “It was very heartwarming. And now we’re done, and it’s positively beautiful.”

Stroll with Campuzano on the path that circles the garden and she will point out something that most people wouldn’t even notice: the soft crunch underfoot of crushed granite. It sounds like walking on a country road.

New gravel might seem like a minor feature in a garden bursting with more than 3,000 luscious, bodacious roses of 139 varieties. But Campuzano and her colleagues paid attention to details great and small as they planned the garden’s makeover.

Richard Allen, a park planner with Kansas City Parks and Recreation, calls the garden “one of the jewels of the park system.”

But when Campuzano became rose society president in 1999, the gem had lost some of its shine.

Roses struggled to grow in soil of the wrong acidity. Without a sprinkler system, city workers had to drag heavy hoses through the flower beds; a new irrigation system has since solved that. Paths were overgrown. The stone pillars and wooden timbers of the pergolas surrounding the garden needed repair.

The nonprofit rose society took the lead to fix things. But where would the money come from? With help from an influential supporter and partner, Commerce Bank’s Jonathan Kemper, the group devised a plan to restore the garden in stages as the money came in.

Campuzano’s relentless efforts around town asking for donations from philanthropic foundations and trusts, garden clubs and, well, just about anyone, impressed her rose society colleagues.

“I said, ‘How do you keep asking people for money?’” says society vice president Cyndy Price of Prairie Village. “And she said, ‘It’s not for me, it’s for the rose garden.’”

The first project on their work list: Install a new fountain, the fourth one in the garden’s history. The first of four capital campaigns raised $850,000 for the fountain alone, which Penner calls the “heartbeat” of the garden.

“After Sandy did the big fundraiser to get that beautiful center fountain, it was just a wonderful symbol of ‘We’re going to make this garden better,’” Price says.

The group worked with BBN Architects and Rosehill Gardens, both of Kansas City, and Architectural Masonry & Restoration in Oak Grove to re-create the garden’s glory days from 84 years ago.

To restore the flower beds, which over time had crept out of their places, the society followed the original quadrant layout created by the Kansas City firm of Hare & Hare. An archivist with the parks department also found old postcards and photos of the garden in various stages of its life over the years to use as reference, Allen says.

Architectural Masonry’s craftsmen restored the pergolas that ring the garden in the last phase of the project completed in November. A big public celebration with ballerinas and bagpipes celebrated the completion of the makeover at the garden’s annual Rose Day in late May.

Maybe because she knows that all the wood used to restore the garden’s north portico came from the same tree — there’s that attention to detail again — or because her own scheduled wedding here in 1981 was rained out, it kind of bothers Price to see the way some people treat the garden.

Apparently a few think “public” rose garden means the public can take the roses. How it pains her to come in to groom on a Thursday and see telltale, straight-across cuts on bare stems.

“The roses are here for everyone to enjoy,” Price says. “They’re not here for you to snip a dozen roses and take to your girlfriend.”

This story was originally published June 12, 2015 at 1:01 PM.