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Roses Are in Full Bloom at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

 June is peak blooming season for roses at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Roses in Bloom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
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PROSPECT HEIGHTS — There's only a couple of weeks left to stop and smell the roses — until next year.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's cherry blossoms are long gone, but their collection of roses have been blooming for weeks at the Cranford Rose Garden. To take in the display, the gardens offer tours at the garden each Wednesday in June, the peak bloom season for roses, where more than a thousand different strains of the flowers are cultivated, garden staff said.

Among the roses growing in ground-level beds, on lattices and on the garden's pavilion are breeds from the 1800s, modern “hybrid” roses and mystery roses found “growing near old homesteads and in graveyards,” according to the BBG website.

Reading the names of the known breeds can be as entertaining as seeing them — among the BBG’s collection are roses named after Julia Child, Dick Clark and Betty Boop. Others have less recognizable, more fanciful names like “Lavaglut,” “Pink Knockout,” “Lady X” and “William Shakespeare 2000.”

Staff at the garden say the display of roses at the BBG includes information for rose lovers on how to choose the best breeds for their own gardens, including information about how to prevent disease in the plants.

Though the roses at the BBG began blooming in May, the flowers will continue producing blooms through the end of the month.

A guided tour of the Cranford Rose Garden begins at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, June 18 and June 25. The tour is free with admission to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which costs $10 for adults, $5 for seniors and students and is free for children 12 years old and younger.