Our town is quiet this time of year. Most tourists and many locals opt to stay away while Mother Nature conducts a set change. But for those who stick around as spring gives way to summer, there is a spectacular treat in store: the brief but prolific bloom of wild yellow roses. These hearty plants typically bloom for a few weeks in mid-June and are widely abundant in the Old Town neighborhood. They are often spotted in the side yards of homes or in locations where the earliest homes of our area once stood. Pioneer life in the 1800s was replete with hardship. The women traveling westward knew their new lives would be defined by hard labor and their success measured by self-perseverance. Despite little room to travel with extraneous goods, many of these women carried cuttings from a plant that produced yellow roses as a cheerful reminder of the homes they were leaving behind.  As they advanced determinedly toward unknown futures, their cuttings may have been stowed in rain barrels, rooted in potatoes, nestled in teacups or wrapped in their long skirts. The name of the plant the pioneer women carried with them is the Harison’s Rose, after George Folliott Harison, a reclusive New York attorney who in 1824 created a new hybrid through the chance crossing of seedlings of a Persian yellow rose (Rosa foetida) with another variety, most likely the Scotch briar (Rosa spinossima), or perhaps the Burnet rose (Rosa pimpinellifolia). In the mid 1830s, a New York nurseryman took cuttings of the Harison’s Rose to propagate into new plants. Success with his propagation efforts, coupled with his marketing savvy, quickly popularized the yellow rose bush. As the Harison’s Rose bush spread across the West, it acquired colloquial names, including the Oregon Trail Rose and the Pioneer Rose. In Texas, it was so widely planted that it was believed to be a native species and became known as the Yellow Rose of Texas. The plants that produce these cheerful yellow flowers are extremely hardy and resistant to pests. They possess distinctive thorn patterns whereby the sharp thorns are closely spaced along the stems. The flowers are clustered, with each flower producing up to 25 petals. Given adequate space, the bushes grow large in diameter due to the suckers that form on the roots. With proper care and some luck, the Harison’s Rose can be propagated in our local climate.  According to Wendy Schmidt, a contributor to the Oregon-based paper Le Grande Observer, “New bushes can be started by carefully digging a sucker or two, being careful with the tender new roots and immediately planting and watering your new plant.  When you relocate those newly separated suckers to a new planting site, bear in mind that the average [plant] reaches the height and width of 3.3 to 5.7 feet; and they’re hardy to minus 35 degrees, or a USDA zone 4.” Keep an eye out for the annual bloom of the Harison’s Rose in the coming weeks! The Park City Museum is hosting a lecture titled “Rooted in Tradition: Native American Food Sovereignty,” given by author, humanities philanthropist and former Chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation Darren Parry on Wednesday, May 20, from 5-6 p.m. at the Museum’s Education and Collections Center at 2079 Sidewinder Drive. Janet Spence Holland is a Park City Museum researcher. The post Way We Were: The yellow rose of Park City appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less