The Wisconsin Gardener

cc If you've ever traveled between Madison and Green Bay, or vice versa chances are you've taken the shortcut on Highway 26 through Rosendale. Hopefully, slowly! Well, now there's a reason to maybe stop in Rosendale besides for police reasons. I'm with Emajean Westphal. Emajean, you are the president of the Rosendale Historical Society in Rosendale. Yes. Rosendale has a reputation. Show me what you've got holding there. We have a reputation for being a speed trap. But we really aren't, because if you don't speed you don't get a ticket. So maybe instead of going slowly through Rosendale stop and smell the peonies. Yes, exactly. You guys are on the National Register of Historic Places because of this garden. Yes, we are. Tell me about it. This garden was started in 1920 as Sisson's Peony Gardens. It was started by Wilbur Sisson in 1920. It was started as a small garden here and right over there. Then, it gradually grew and in 1950, he sold it to-- He passed away and Jess Phillips who had been working for him for 21 years, bought the garden and proceeded to enlarge it to five acres. Wow. So then in 1968, Governor Warren Knowles declared Rosendale's peony gardens Sisson's Peony Gardens in Rosendale as the State Peony Capital. This is the Peony Capital of Wisconsin. And who knew? Like I said, we all think of something else when we're driving very carefully through here. Exactly. It's right on the main drag, so some of the features that we see are the windmill and that stone archway. One thing would be the windmill. That was built by Jess Phillips after he graduated from college. Sisson got him to build the windmill out of stones that were from the Methodist Church which had been moved. Then there were stones left, so he built the archway after the windmill. It was quite the site, but then something bad happened. Oh, yes. Eventually, it got into disrepair. Jess Phillips sold it in 1980. By 1984, there was very little left. They sold the area back there and apartments were built on it. So therefore, all that remained was a half acre up here. Which is beautiful. And this became a dog yard. What happened to the peonies? Well, the peonies are really hard to kill but they would come up in the grass. The dogs would run over them and they'd get mowed over. They'd come up again and they'd get mowed over. So for 21 years, they just basically got mowed over. 21 years they were mowed over? Yes, and they still kept up. In 2005, the Historical Society had the opportunity to get this half acre of garden. We got it and started looking for what was coming up. The first year, this whole area was fenced in with a woven wire fence which had wild grapes and cucumbers growing on it. The trees that were here were box elder trees. So in the spring of 2005 we decided to take it all down. We had a whole crew of volunteers that worked on this. So you guys had to start over again. Yes, we had to start over. One of the questions with all this being in disrepair-- Obviously, this was a community effort. Yes, it was. With the peonies being mowed over how did you know which peonies are what because I see a lot of these have labels. Well, we know very little of what there was. Some of them were famous ones like Jess Phillips had hybridized the peony named after his daughter, which was Tinka Phillips. We knew what that one looked like, so that one we could name. So you're slowly still trying to identify these from 20, 40, 50 years ago? Yes, and I need to say that this garden was laid out in 2005 by two people. It was Betty and Dick Dahlke. They did an absolutely magnificent job of laying it out like it is. In 2007, they added the raised beds. That was all their idea. They did a magnificent job of laying it out and deciding what to put where. Since then, we've bought new peonies so we have names, so we know what they are. You keep going. It's truly a labor of love. It's one of the most unique community gardens open to the public. The best time to see it is in June. Oh, exactly, in June. Thank you so much for sharing this with us, Emajean. Thank you.