Tyler Rose Garden and Rose Museum

The Tyler Municipal Rose Garden, at 420 Rose Park Drive, holds more than 38,000 rose bushes representing about 600 cultivars, according to the City of Tyler. The garden is free and open daily from sunrise to sunset. The city's Rose Garden Center, an exhibit and workshop space, hosts the Texas Rose Festival.

The garden exists because of what happened to Smith County's orchards. The Handbook of Texas says growers turned to roses after a peach blight wiped out much of the county's fruit industry, that roses were a major business by the 1920s, and that by the 1940s more than half the nation's supply of rose bushes was grown within ten miles of Tyler. The Texas Rose Festival grew out of that business, is held each October and draws about 100,000 visitors, and the Tyler Rose Museum says the first festival took place in 1933.

The Tyler Rose Museum, at the same address, keeps festival memorabilia and costumes collected since that first festival, along with the history of the rose industry. Museum admission is $3.50 for adults and $2 for children 2 to 11. Its weekday hours are 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with shorter hours on weekends, and it closes Sundays and Mondays from November to mid-March. The Rose Garden Center is open Monday through Saturday and Sunday afternoons, with longer hours in December. Hours change, so call ahead.