How Bitter Radicchio Became Portland’s 21st-Century Sweetheart
Published by Portland Monthly in Fall 2026. Photo by Shawn Linehan.
FEW HAVE LOVED THE ROSE more than Frederick V. Holman, the prominent Portland lawyer and lifelong bachelor who cultivated more than 500 varieties at his home on SW Taylor Street and, in a 1901 Oregonian op-ed, asked Portlanders to “Make Portland the ‘Rose City.’” He laid out his grand request in practical terms, noting which varieties to plant—such haughty French characters as Papa Gontier, Viscountess Folkestone, and Souvenir du Président Carnot—and giving instructions on ordering bushes. Portlanders took up his call, planting some 50,000 rosebushes in time for the 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition. Thanks in part to Holman’s continued lectures, articles, and a how-to pamphlet, Roses at Portland, Oregon, and How to Grow Them, our city held its first Rose Festival in 1907. Two years after that, an estimated 100 million rose blooms perfumed the June air, and Portland had earned its nickname.
More than a century later, I’m huffing roses under a May sky in Margarett Waterbury’s garden. “This rose smells like apricot custard cream soda,” announces Waterbury, a writer and a friend of mine. Alongside us, another friend, Oregon State University professor Lane Selman, wears blush-pink Sambas. She chose them because they’re the girlish pink of the Rosa del Veneto—not a rose at all but a radicchio variety that few Portlanders encountered until a couple of years ago, when our winter groceries began blooming in rosy profusion.
