Coming up roses

The US city of Portland has suffered its share of blights but keeps the faith in its crowning glory. 

-  CLARE GLEESON

For 100 consecutive nights in the middle of 2020, protesters rioted and looted in downtown Portland, Oregon, following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Some referred to it as Groundhog Night. Three kilometres away, in the well-fertilised and mulched garden beds of Washington Park, thousands of roses slumbered. As Portland's inner city woke to broken glass and ashes, the buds unfurled and the flowers bloomed. At the time the Trump administration declared Portland a jurisdiction in anarchy, the roses were putting on their last summer flush.

Portland is the largest city in the state of Oregon, with a population of 645,000. In recent years, it has gained a reputation as a hipster city, fondly referred to as Portlandia and revelling in the slogan "Keep Portland Weird". But for many years, Portland has also been known as the "Rose City" or by its official nickname, the "City of Roses". Roses are a symbol of love and romance - a direct contrast to Portland's recent history of protest and destruction.

A report published in August by the University of California, Berkeley ranked Portland near the bottom of 62 large US cities in terms of how well they had rebounded from the pandemic. The city's problems started long before Covid and the Black Lives Matter protests, but throughout it all, its roses have continued to bloom.

Portland's close association with the rose began in 1888 when local identity Georgiana Pittock hosted the first backyard rose show at her mansion, leading to the formation of the Portland Rose Society. The Pittock mansion, which is now open to the public, includes a border planted in roses that were available in her time.