The New York Botanical Garden’s Annual Rose Garden Dinner celebrates the autumn flowering of the garden’s prodigious rose collection, which includes nearly 700 varieties. This year, the benefit honoring Marjorie Rosen raised $675,000 to Benefit NYBG’s Fund for Horticulture as well as the gorgeous Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden.
This year’s event featured the expected suite of beautiful roses– adorning the entrance in lovely hanging vessels, festooned to the columns in the spillover cocktail room, and curated together in perfect orbs set atop each table setting. New York Botanical Garden’s first female president, Carrie Rebora Barratt (who came to the organization from the Metropolitan Museum of Art last March) gave the opening statements about horticulturalist and self-identified “plant geek” Marjorie Rosen, who has offered the garden immense leadership and inspiration in her 22 years of sterling service.
Photo Courtesy The New York Botanical Garden. © BFA.com / Angela Pham
The evening’s guests included Ariana Rockefeller, who wore a lovely theme-appropriate rose patterned dress and rose colored heels while exploring the rose garden named after her grandmother.
Other notable guests included Jason Amis, Vera Aryeh, Carrie Rebora Barratt, John Bernstein, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Richard and Maureen Chilton, Barclay Collins, Diana Davenport, Todd Forrest, Charlotte Frieze, Bob Gossett, Jill Joyce, and many others.
Despite a rain shower earlier in the day, many of the guests were able to get out and enjoy the eponymous rose garden before dinner and dancing began– a garden with nearly 700 varieties of roses that continue to thrive in the only surviving New York City garden designed by eminent landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, who did so in 1916.
Renowned as one of the most beautiful rose gardens in America, the Rockefeller Rose Garden has become one of the most sustainable public gardens in the world– and with event’s like the Rose Garden, it continues to welcome support from the enthusiastic community who continue to ensure that it will prosper.
