Volunteers tend to the roses as visitors enjoy the Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland. (Anda Chu/Staff archives)

OAKLAND — Given its visual appeal and quiet outdoor setting, Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden offers much for tourists and locals alike.

A great place for a Sunday stroll or a morning jog, this picturesque and colorful place — an urban oasis and home to many varieties of roses — provides a soothing atmosphere. And it’s not just the plants, as visitors can enjoy waterworks and a pond, and sometimes other visitors, such as a wild turkey.

During his lifetime, Peter Wyeth Hurd took many a walk through the garden with his wife, Victoria. A musician by profession, Hurd — a nephew of famed artist Andrew Wyeth — found both inspiration and respite in Morcom, located close to where he lived.

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The Morcom Rose Garden is a beautifully manicured garden featuring intricate paths and walkways, a reflecting pool, cascading fountain and thousands of roses.

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Volunteers tend to the roses as visitors enjoy the Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland on Saturday. Thousands of community and corporate volunteers clean and green more than 90 locations throughout the city during the 20th annual Oakland Earth Day.

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OAKLAND — Nestled in a canyon in an Oakland neighborhood lies a rare 7-acre oasis of green and multiple shades of rose, the Morcom Rose Garden, a 1930s-era formal garden with winding paths, climbing stairways and lovely fountains and pools. It is home to almost 5,000 rose bushes, and the fact that they all continue to bloom is partly due to a group of volunteers, appropriately named The Dedicated Deadheaders.

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Get a sneak preview of the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show.

From the sublime — an opening night sneak preview of the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show — to the possibly ridiculous (recommended dress: tie-dye and black tie), the March 19 Friends of the Oakland Rose Garden gala promises to be no ordinary fundraiser.

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Neighboring Berkeley’s rose garden is better known, but maybe that’s because lovers of Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden want to keep it their little secret. The roses — an elaborate mix that includes a dark-red Taboo variety and the flamboyantly orange Las Vegas — reach their fragrant and colorful peak around the middle of May, but Morcom is a quiet urban oasis all year long. Find a spot on one of the garden’s benches or a patch of grass next to the reflecting pool and enjoy the tranquility.

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When things are overly stressful, a good shower, a good, nutrition-filled meal, and curling up under a thick blanket – makes all the difference.

With the help of 35 volunteers and Malibu Compost, 5,000 roses were pampered in just that way.

And the roses thanked everyone by getting their mojo back. Biodynamic compost tea and compost saved an historic garden…

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Oakland is for lovers. Nothing affirms this more than spring in the Morcom Rose Garden. Sunken in a valley-like amphitheater at 700 Jean st. off of Grand Avenue, the rose garden is a floral oasis amidst the buzz of the city. This past Saturday, while strolling through the rows of well-cultivated and fragrant roses with my girl, we encountered a couple that had met there three years ago to the day (see gallery below). He had been there painting, she stopped to talk, and three years later they were telling us about their pending nuptials…

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This month’s Oakland Magazine features an article about the Morcom Rose Garden.  Written by local journalist Wanda Hennig, it features the history of the Dedicated Deadheaders.

“Oakland never promised you a rose garden. But thanks to President Roosevelt’s Depression-era Works Progress Administration initiative and rose lovers at the Oakland Businessmen’s Breakfast Club back in the 1930s, the city got one. It was named for then-mayor Frank Morcom. Now, due in no small part to the passion of Oakland Public Works Agency garden crew leader Tora Rocha, the Morcom Rose Garden, which had lost its bloom along with its All American Rose Selection, or AARS, accreditation, is back to its glory days.”

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