Coming Up Roses

Bob and Louise Livesay are taking time during their retirement to stop and smell the roses. And prune them, fertilize them, water them and generally treat them with loving care.

Since 1993, the couple have been the lead volunteer groundskeepers of the Heritage Memorial Rose Garden at the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park.

The Livesays spearheaded a joint effort between the Ventura County Rose Society and Conejo Valley Historical Society to create the 800-square-foot antique rose garden on what was a vacant and weed-choked lot at the museum entrance. Since then, they have spent at least one full day a week--or about 40 to 50 hours a month--at the garden and museum.

“We used to come up here pretty often [to the museum] and there was just a patch of weeds in this spot, and we felt that putting in a garden would look nice and give us a chance to educate people about the roses and make them available to the public,” said Livesay, a native of Los Angeles.

This is a busy time for the couple because this weekend, the Stagecoach Inn Museum will host the Ventura County Rose Society’s fourth annual rose show. An estimated 40 exhibitors will show off their prize creations for judges from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday. The public is invited to view the bounty of blossoms from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

The Livesays’ interest in roses goes back to Louise Livesay’s roots in Oklahoma, where her mother took pride in her garden.

“I remember my mother filled special vases in the house with roses that she spent a lot of time caring for,” she said. “It’s not as easy to grow roses in Oklahoma as it is in California.”

The Livesays met in 1944 while he was training B-17 bomber pilots at an air base in Ardmore, Okla., Louise’s hometown. After they married, the Livesays moved to Southern California and started a family.

According to Livesay, his work as a petroleum engineer for Texaco, Louise’s job as a special education teacher and the couple’s three kids left them little time for tending flowers.

“Gardening wasn’t our thing then,” Livesay said. “Raising kids was.”

In 1989, the Livesays retired and moved to the Westlake area of Thousand Oaks. It was then that they rekindled their love for the rose.

“When we moved to Westlake in ‘89, there were some old roses in the garden and we planted some more and it just took off from there; eventually we had more than 100 rosebushes,” he said.

In an effort to learn more about the flowers they grew, the Livesays joined the Ventura County Rose Society in 1991. Since then, they have become more involved every year.

Once a month, the Livesays and a group of society volunteers spend a full day maintaining the 45-bush rose garden, which, according to Livesay, only includes roses that could have existed at the time of the original Stagecoach Inn in 1876.

“These roses were planted in a deliberate effort to be historically accurate,” he said.

One bush with a particularly interesting history is the pink “Old Blush,” first grown in China in 1752. According to the Livesays, who are also docents at the museum, this type of rose is captured in the photograph of the signing of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.

“There might be millions of generations in between,” Livesay said, “but that rose may be related to the one that was in the photograph.”