Set back from the road surrounded by wooden rail fencing, a granite stone looks out over Little Harbor and the island beyond. On its surface is carved a short memorial to a man who brought world acclaim to the Cape:
Nestled between old buildings that look like they’ve witnessed the American Revolution, it takes some imagination to see the sprawling rose garden that once covered this hillside.
In 1850 businessman Joseph Story Fay came to Woods Hole to set himself up as one of the Cape’s first modern summer residents in a large two-story house. Mr. Fay enjoyed gardening; at least, he enjoyed gardens. He directed the planting of trees around his estate, a notable undertaking on 19th century Cape Cod, whose forests had long ago been replaced by grazing land.
To his home he brought a talented horticulturalist, Michael Walsh. The 27-year-old from Wales had an undeniable green thumb and for 47 years tended and cultivated the Fays’ gardens with true world renown. His specialty, as the memorial notes, was the rambler rose. More flexible in the stem and further travelers than the climbing rose, the rambler rose came to the United States from England, and in the care of Michael Walsh thrived in Woods Hole.
Caring for three acres of Fay garden wasn’t Mr. Walsh’s only accomplishment. He began creating new varieties of rambler roses. By the turn of the century these new roses began winning awards, both in the United States and abroad. Eventually an invisible line was drawn down the center of the Fay gardens; on one side Mr. Walsh worked and experimented, and on the other the Fays hired another gardener to tend the private plot.
Disaster, relative to the rose world, befell in 1901, when nearly the entire crop was poisoned out of existence by a fire at the train depot. Workers set ablaze an engine shed and small out buildings in an effort to clear the old structure to build anew. The toxic fumes from the conflagration wafted over the tracks and up the hill to the Fay garden. The plants wilted and despite pleas from the gardener the fire burned for three days, consuming the shed and the crop of new hybridized tea roses almost ready for market.
Joseph Story Fay died in 1897 and his daughter, Sarah, became a driving force behind supporting Mr. Walsh’s experimentation in roses. She was the one most often associated with the rose garden in Woods Hole. She continued to live in her father’s house until her death in 1936. The Fay estate dwindled and disappeared along with the garden. The house still stands, home to offices for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Michael Walsh died in 1922 after 47 years of work in the Fay garden. His roses are mostly lost to history, but the lone granite memorial set back off Woods Hole road still bears testament to the world-renowned work of a horticulturist from Wales.