Garden with
a Southern (Avenue)
exposure
Mesa Community College is home to
Arizona’s largest rose garden. Running
along Southern Avenue, the garden
has more than 8,000 rose bushes.
Newcomers to Arizona are often surprised to learn that roses grow well in our desert climate. More surprising to some was to learn that until recently, the roses they grew back home may well have have come from Arizona.
Until the housing boom of the last decade, it was estimated that more than a third of commercially grown roses in the country came from the West Valley.
Mild winters and year round sunshine make this prime country for roses.
Arizona has a number of outstanding public rose gardens, the largest of which is at Mesa Community College.
The garden extends for a quarter mile along the college’s main entrance on Southern Avenue and has morethan 8,000 roses.
It is open to the public.
A joint venture between the Mesa-East Valley Rose Society and Mesa Community College, the garden opened in 1997.