How to Make Time Stand Still

I never knew a rosebush could smell like anise. When I sniffed a lemon-chiffon-colored blossom, an aroma of licorice emerged.

I was visiting the 5.5-acre Municipal Rose Garden in San Jose, California, on a particularly sweltering spring day. Heavy heat sweetened the experience—the flowers tend to release their oils in high temperatures. As I passed from one verdant section of the grounds to another, I felt my senses relax. This was a fragrant respite from the strip malls and cul-de-sacs that thread the urban fabric of my hometown.

Designed by John McLaren (the horticulturalist behind Golden Gate Park and a close friend of John Muir’s), San Jose’s signature rose garden opened in 1931, when the population was about 50,000. Nearly a century later, the garden endures. It has survived in part thanks to a dedicated group of volunteers in green vests who have maintained the place.

Peel back the proverbial petals of this or that rose and its name reveals a story. Violet’s Pride, a lavender-and-fuchsia-tinged variety, was named after a character in Downton Abbey. Others were inspired by visual artists Frida Kahlo and Dale Chihuly. Some names speak for themselves, like Scentimental and Drop Dead Red. White Licorice, bred by hybridizer Christian Bédard, was one of 189 varieties in bloom throughout the park. Another of Bédard’s creations, Angelic Veil, was scheduled to debut soon.

San Jose was once known as “the Garden City.” Before the tech industry took hold in this area—followed by the moniker Silicon Valley—it was called “the Valley of Heart’s Delight.” It was an agricultural epicenter, where orchards, farmland, and the canning industry fueled the local economy for generations. Over the course of 50 years, suburbia replaced it all, and the population increased to a million people. Planning commissioners moved old houses around like chess pieces and bulldozed historical structures, replacing them with parking lots. For many San Jose natives who witnessed this history unfold, the places that shaped their childhood have vanished.

I spent years writing about those changes, in columns that often pointed out the failures of my city. For a time, I fell into a comfort zone of deep sarcasm that wasn’t always comforting. I couldn’t sit with the impermanence of everything around me. I was dissatisfied with my town and with myself. It was an emptiness that was hard to explain.

Then, in 2024, I came to the rose garden and really took it in for the first time: a place that felt timeless and full, with a richness that spoke not just of the diversity of wild nature but of humanity as well. As I navigated pathways through the garden, I heard visitors speaking Spanish, Korean, and Hindi, a glorious sound collage. Wedding planners scoped out the scene, and photographers crouched to snap close-ups of flowers. Majestic redwoods planted by Girl Scouts in the 1930s towered behind a fountain. The original restrooms, brick fortifications built by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, remained intact. I had never noticed these details before.

Since then, I have made time to come back and smell these roses. That isn’t a metaphor. My mood improves here. My feelings toward my city do too. I don’t wallow in the notion that something fundamental is lost in living an urban life, or that suffering is inevitable. I allow a larger story to comfort me: I don’t need Google to confirm that a garden of heart’s delight is out there, ready to inspire my senses, if I just take the time to look for it.