VOLUNTEERS GIVE GARDEN ROSY FUTURE

Everything's coming up roses again in Capaha Park.

The prize-winning Capaha Rose Garden has been in decline in recent years, a victim of too few volunteers and soil problems. But this year, the Cape Girardeau Council of Garden Clubs, a new influx of volunteers and the city of Cape Girardeau have collaborated to return the Capaha Rose Garden to the pink.

Though very late in the growing season, the garden is still ablaze with the varieties of reds, whites, pinks, yellows and oranges of roses with names like brass band, sheer bliss, fragrant rhapsody and Diana, Princess of Wales.

Previously called the Rose Display Garden, the garden received the State Achievement Award in 1956 from he Federated Garden Clubs of Missouri -- just one year after beds were prepared and the first planting began. Thereafter, it was certified as a display garden by All America, one of the country's largest rose companies. At one time, the garden at Capaha Park's northwest entrance had 1,350 roses in 239 varieties. It made the City of Roses shine.

But in recent years, the numbers and size of blooms in the garden's beds have decreased. Anne Foust, president of the garden club council, blames acidity problems with the soil and years of dwindling garden club membership due to women entering the job market.

All 73 members of the four garden clubs that maintain the rose garden -- Ramblewood, Four Seasons, River Hills and Rose Hill -- are women.

'Just sitting there'

Roses require lots of attention. "It wasn't that people weren't working," Foust said. "We kept pouring on fertilizer, but we weren't getting results. They weren't growing. They were just sitting there."

Last spring, a fund drive enabled the clubs to install a drip irrigation system which seems to have made a big difference. Jackson Boy Scout Troop 11 mulched most of the 42 beds as a community project. The city's Parks and Recreation Department built a house for the watering system and maintains the grass around the beds. And some patients in the Cardiac Rehab Program at Southeast Missouri Hospital became involved after one of them heard about the garden's plight.

One of them, semi-retired Ware, Ill., farmer Howard "Bud" Davie, has been growing roses for 20 years. He phoned Jackson and Perkins, a well-known company that sells roses, to ask if they would donate some bushes. "I was thinking 10 to 20," he said. "They said, How about 300?"

He thought that would be too many to handle all at once so he took 120, all of which are now growing in the garden. The garden now has an estimated 800 rose bushes.

Davie works in the garden once a week and is known among the other gardeners for dusting the roses with a concoction they call Bud Grow. He wants people in Cape Girardeau "to know they've got something unique that no one else has."

Restaurateur Dennis "Doc" Cain, another volunteer from the Cardiac Rehab Program, has a favorite rose -- double delight -- and a favorite job in the garden, "dead-heading," the task of snapping off dead buds so they don't become rose hips.

"You get to walk around and just look and smell them," he said.

He thinks working in the rose garden has helped with his recovery from a heart attack.

"Stop and smell the roses. That saying didn't come from nothing," Cain said.