The Christchurch Botanic Gardens
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 Central Rose Garden
The Central Rose Garden is of a formal design. It is ideally situated, having a sunny, sheltered site away from large trees. This garden contains cultivars and hybrids of modern garden roses including bush, climbing, standard and miniature roses. Each year the roses are evaluated on their performance, age and health with up to six beds replanted with recently introduced cultivars and hybrids including many international award-winning roses. In this replanting, an emphasis is placed upon colour and height graduation, with the outermost beds containing the taller bush roses and stronger red and orange colours.
The original Rose Garden was established in 1909. At that time it was considered the largest and finest in Australasia. Rectangular in shape, the design was based on the Rose Garden owned by the Duchess of Sutherland in Herefordshire, England.
Covering much of the lawn surrounding the present day Rose Garden, the original Rose Garden contained 132 beds supporting 2,402 bush roses, 126 standard roses and was framed with huge pergolas smothered by climbing roses. Box hedging totalling over 17 kilometres in length was used to edge the rose beds.
At this time the western half of the Gardens (which included the Rose Garden) was without a water supply and plants depended entirely on rainfall or water collected in buckets from the Avon River. It was not long before the soil was exhausted and the roses and the box hedging past their prime. In 1935 the Rose Garden was redesigned, largely to its present day style. The reconstruction work was a major undertaking with over 800 cubic metres of soil transported to the site by dray. A Yew hedge providing shelter from the prevailing easterly wind, enclosed the circular layout. A mirror pool in the centre of the garden was replaced with a sundial in memory of Mr Thomas Stevenson in 1954. The Pergola archways were added to each entranceway of the Rose Garden during 1995.
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