Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden

This guide to the Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden in San Diego follows Dick Streeper, a rose grower who became president of the San Diego Rose Society in 1969 and pushed for a public rose garden despite being told flatly it had already failed once. With fellow rosarians Jean Kenneally and Jim Kirk, he worked the city council toward a site chosen in 1973, funded by a foundation set up in memory of a philanthropist who died the year before the garden opened. You'll hear how a panel of national judges later arrived to walk these same paths and decide what this garden had become. Come on a Tuesday or Thursday morning and you might spot the volunteer corps still tending the beds.