Pictured here are portraits for this girl who was having her birthday! Her mom wanted to get portraits of her for her birthday and we met up at the rose garden at MCC in early May 2023. Scroll down to see more!
Have you ever wandered around the rose garden at Mesa Community College?
I went to MCC years ago and my friend Lisa’s dad was one of the volunteers who helped build the multi-acre rose garden. I met Lisa in an art class and we became friends who would go to raves and dancing together. She became friends with my friends, I became friends with her friends, she would invite us out to Apache Junction for homemade Indian food meals made by her mom. I know she had mentioned her dad worked at the rose garden, but years passed without me thinking about actually going to check it out.
I started noticing lots of photographers I follow on Instagram posting pics at a rose farm. From sort of researching/delving through the photos, I could tell the rose farm was on the far west side of the valley. I’ve never actually gone to see that farm. I would love to someday. But looking at those images made me finally remember that here in the east valley we have roses. Not very far from my house!
So my nephew and I went to the MCC rose garden on a really cold day between Christmas and New Years. I just could NOT BELIEVE the floral amazingness of the rose garden. I absolutely did not expect thousands of rose bushes of almost every color to be in bloom at such a cold, wintery time of year! So I definitely learned something that day: roses in Arizona bloom in cold times, around the holidays. Also, I learned that at the same time, the trees in the MCC rose garden were losing their golden and red leaves and it was gorgeous: bright yellow carpets of leaves, bright red carpets of leaves. It was so incredibly pretty. It would make for great portraits for folks who would be OK with lying down on the grass amongst the leaves. Oh and the grass? Super emerald soft winter grass! The type of winter grass you just really want to sink down into and hang out for a while staring up at the sky! Or the roses!
So then I came back a couple weeks later in early January and the roses had been pruned a ton and the garden was rather lackluster. The trees had lost all their leaves.
The MCC rose garden website says:
The best times to see the Rose Garden are late March, April, May, June, November, and December. During January, February, September, and October, the Garden is heavily pruned and will therefore not be in bloom.
So then in April, my nephew and I went back to the rose garden. We brought both his strider bike and his EZ roller bike. I didn’t want him to be bored. Flowers are my jam, not his! There are concrete paths and benches and little walls to climb on all around. So he definitely didn’t get bored, and found all the play opportunities! There were trees in bloom with purple petals and MCC seems to irrigate every other Wednesday, which means water to wade through for my nephew! We ended going back a few times this spring 2023, always on Wednesdays. The rose bushes were just in full out bloom, just thousands and thousands and thousands of multi-colored blooms. I would always get In-N-Out dinner for my nephew and then we wandered/explored/played.
If you are ever looking for a location to have a picnic with friends or a romantic date, I’d suggest going to the MCC rose garden in the spring. You could get takeout from Pita Jungle across the street, lay out a picnic blanket, and have a leisurely, possibly magical experience! And if you wanted an after-dinner walk, the Mesa Community College is a nice place to walk around. There are plenty of trees in all the acres of roses, so there is plenty of shade for the middle of the day, but I think the best time is at sunset when the scent of the roses is in full force - and completely intoxicating!
If you are the type of person who likes to read all the plaques at museums or the type of person who likes to read all the names on tombstones at cemetaries, you might like to go around reading all the names of the roses at the MCC garden. All of them have names and some of the names are really great.
Total aside, not related to roses: if you like trees, check out this cool interactive arboretum map from the MCC website. It shows all the trees on campus and gives data about them. So now I know that one of the biggest trees in the rose garden is a Shamel ash and it is ~86 feet tall and has a trunk diameter of approx. 49 inches. It’s a great tree to get photos under!
I will definitely be doing more photo shoots in the rose garden during the spring of 2024. And I might be doing them in the winter of 2023 (that time of year gets so busy, so I just have to see.) If you would like an Mesa Community Rose Garden shoot, fill out this form and I will make sure to send you info when I decide on times for photo shoots. Or if you have a particular date in mind, inquire and we can figure it out! Most of my shoots begin an hour before sunset for that magical golden light!
