06/05/2026
Found roses. Lost names. Growing in a cemetery for over 100 years. We’re helping preserve them.
Fairmount Cemetery was founded in 1890, when Denver was still closer to a mining camp than a city. Its designer, Reinhard Schuetze — Colorado's first landscape architect — loved roses and placed them through the grounds as focal points, close to 400 plants across what grew into the state's largest arboretum. In the years after, families added their own roses beside headstones, a way of remembering the people buried there.
Most of those roses have since lost their names. With no labels or records tying them to a catalog, rosarians call them "found roses," and they're usually given a study name taken from the grave they grow beside. They've held on through hard Colorado winters and not much care — which is how the cemetery, and the people in it, end up in a rose's name.
The roses we've propagated from Fairmount will be there alongside many others — Fairmount Red, Fairmount Proserpine, Fairmount Semi-double, Mae Fair Pink, Beulah Blakley, and JoAnn's Pink Perpetual, plus heirlooms, hybrid teas, miniatures, floribundas, shrubs, and climbers, including Julia Child, Lady in Red, Morden Snow Beauty, Jeanne Lajoie, and Cherry Frost.
If you're in the Denver area, we'd love to see you there. The sale runs Saturday, June 6, from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. — or until the roses are gone — at the Chapel in the Pines at Fairmount Cemetery, 430 S. Quebec. Look for the chapel on the northeast side of the main office. It's free to attend.
Find out more about the Fairmount roses we're helping to preserve:
https://bit.ly/HCR-Fairmount-Cemetery-Roses
Fairmount Funeral Home, Cemetery & Crematory
