Rose, peony and clematis (public) Garden  

Listing last updated on Wed Nov 2024

501 S Lake St
GARY, Indiana 46403
United States

I started the rose garden that stretches around Carter G. Woodson branch of the Gary public library in the hot summer of 2016 when I was moving from Evanston Illinois to Miller Beach, Indiana. I brought with me to Indiana almost all of my roses (see the Pepperchino garden) and some I planted around my new home. The Miller Garden Club generously offered me the space around the library building and I planted there almost 100 old garden roses, all of different hybrids, more than half of them French.
I dedicated this rose garden to Simone de Beauvoir, the French thinker who visited Miller Beach while Nelson Algren was still living here. All the roses and plants in the garden are hybrids and species found in existence before World War II; my intent is to make it a TIME CAPSULE, a place to read and freely exchange ideas of humanism and feminism, education, social justice, and empowerment; to walk and admire the roses of times long past and tell their story.
2018 is the third year of the "Simone de Beauvoir" rose garden.

Chef Raz

"After dinner I sat a long time in the garden and looked at the sky which was losing its blue and pink colors, and looked at the nice bit of glittering moon above the roof, and I felt happy to be a human being with two eyes and a heart. There are such fine roses blooming in the garden! I do not like flowers so much, except when you have bought them for me (then I eat them greedily), but these roses amaze me. It is very strange that such beautiful things may be given by nobody: it looks like a gift, without anybody making the gift to you. Some people would think of God about it but in fact, it is not at all the kind of gift any God could do."
Simone de Beauvoir in a letter to Nelson Algren, dated "Tuesday, 24th June 1947"