Hansen Park Rose Garden

Hansen Park is a small island park in Livermore, located where First Street meets Holmes Street. The garden was planted in 1963 by the East Bay Rose Society, Livermore Lions Club, and the City of Livermore. In 2012, the Livermore Amador Valley Garden Club (LAVGC) partnered with the City of Livermore to help maintain and improve the rose garden. LAVGC regularly partners with the Landscape and Maintenance Division of the City of Livermore Public Works Department while maintaining this garden.
 
The garden includes a fountain, a small arbor with a few benches, a sculpture, and an old-fashioned wagon. Blooms from the 400+ roses are visible from the streets. Paths encourage a walk through the beds to enjoy the colors and fragrances from the varied blossoms.
 
Various organizations in the community have provided support for this park. LAVGC has received advice and generous donations in the form of discounted prices from Alden Lane Nursery, Western Garden Nursery, the Mount Diablo Rose Society, Kellogg Garden Products, Livermore Feed and Farm Supply, Sanctuary Soil and Feed, and others. The Hansen family also made a financial donation to LAVGC to help maintain roses in the park.
 
Participation
 
This service project is open to all garden club members, from novices to experienced gardeners. You don't know how to prune roses? No worries, we'll teach you! We all learn from each other.

This park is at the corner of First Street and Holmes in Livermore. As of early 2023, there is no sign in the park. However, some of our members are working with the Livermore Beautification Committee to add a sign to the park. So you might see one eventually. If you see this sculpture, you know you're in the right place.
 
Activity and Photo Archive
 
In early 2021 LAVGC received a PLANT AMERICA Community Project grant from the National Garden Clubs Inc. In March, 2021, using the Grant money, LAVGC members and City of Livermore workers updated Hansen Garden. Nile Runge photographed the event. The photos are available in slide show manner at the following Dropbox link. Just click on the link, click on the first photo, and at the bottom of the photo in a black box with arrows. Click on an arrow to go to the next photo. We were also featured in the Pleasanton Weekly and The Independent newspapers.

May, 2018. Our May 24 work party.

January, 2014. In the last few weeks, thanks to the Livermore-Amador Valley Garden Club (LAVGC), there has been a lot of gardening activity at Livermore's Hansen Park. During the holidays and early January, LAVGC held three work parties to plant and prune roses at the park.

On December 28, 2013 and January 2, 2014, a dozen Club members planted 82 roses, 75 of which were generously donated to the park by Star Roses. The goals of the planting were to replace aging roses, add roses found in the original 1960s garden, fill in gaps where roses were missing, and add a planting bed dedicated to roses hybridized by Walter Lammerts, a famous hybridizer of roses (e.g Queen Elizabeth, Bewitched, and Chrysler Imperial) who lived in Livermore in the early 1960s.

In conjunction with the planting work parties, a group of members also pruned roses. The final rose pruning work party was held on January 11 with 22 members attending. All of the work parties were a wonderful example of "many hands make light work". Stop by the park and take a look at the roses.

Pictures: January, 2013. A group of 23 volunteers pruned all of the approximately 460 roses in four and a half hours. The city improved the irrigation of the roses in February by adding more sprinklers and adjusting some of the overhead watering. Our March effort involved spreading Preen on the beds to inhibit weeds. Lydia, the LAVGC Hansen Park coordinator, has done a tremendous job in getting donations of fertilizer from Kellogg (enough to fertilize all of the roses) and alfalfa pellets at a reduced cost from Livermore Feed and Farm Supply. Alfalfa pellets are wonderful fertilizer, especially for roses. LAVGC has also been fortunate to have received a donation of two pallets (70 bags each) of worm castings from Sanctuary Soil and Feed in Vernalis, and one of the pallets went to Hansen Park.

Pictures: April 2013. We had a work party to apply the 70 bags (~1 ton) of worm castings (donated by Mitch Davis of Sanctuary Soil and Feed), ~9 bags (450 pounds) of organic fertilizer (donated by Kelloggs and delivered to the City yard by Western Garden Nursery), and 350 pounds of alfalfa pellets sold to us at a reduced cost by Livermore Feed and Farm Supply.

We continued the task of identifying the roses in the park, and throughout the summer we held several work parties to dead head the roses and pull weeds.

In Summer 2013, we also developed a path forward to replace ailing roses and to add roses where roses have died. Anne Homan, Livermore's historian, has kindly supplied us newspaper articles with extremely valuable information on the history of the park and the original rose layout, and we will use that information to re-introduce some of the original roses back into the park.

Pictures: November 2012. Over 16 members dead-headed roses and The Independent wrote 2 articles; one on the history of Hansen Park and another on the LAVGC efforts to restore the park to its former glory.