At the age of 89, Ellen Elliff is hitting the gym to get back in shape. Her roses need her to get rid of the walker and get back in the garden.
Elliff is the owner of the house at Northeast 41st Avenue and Klickitat Street, the one with hundreds of rose bushes. Elliff isn’t sure of the precise number – it’s somewhere between 200 and 250. She’s especially fond of the white JFK and the red Mr. Lincoln and the pink Queen of Peace and the yellow Gold Medal.
“The favorite is usually the one I’m looking at right then,” she says.
Ever since she started the rose garden in 1974, Elliff has won awards and admiration. Drivers stop to take photos and neighbors bring out-of-town visitors.
But about a year ago, Elliff fell down some stairs and spent 10 days in the hospital. Since then, she’s had to use a walker or a cane. A couple of months ago, she joined the Hollywood 24-Hour Fitness. A couple times a week, she hangs her Trader Joe’s shopping bags from her walker, gets on a bus and goes to the gym to regain her strength. In addition to gardening, she needs to get well so she can kneel in church.
In the meantime, her 65-year-old daughter, Patricia Orton, and a former tenant, Tracy Duncan, have helped out with the roses.
But growing healthy roses takes a lot of work – pruning, weeding, four feedings a year and hand watering in the summer.
That dedication and hard work impresses Betsy Ray, who has lived behind Elliff for 19 years. For years, Elliff would have a load of topsoil delivered to her house and then use a wheelbarrow to haul a bunch of it more than five blocks away, to a rental house she owns near McPeet’s Portland Pub.
“Ellen’s a character, alright,” Ray says.
Elliff started planting the roses 38 years ago. She and her husband, Roy Elliff, had built a retaining wall in the front yard. It seemed natural to plant roses atop the wall.
“Little by little, we just added on,” she says. In the late 1970’s, she won the city of Portland’s Frank L. Beach Rose Visibility Award. Her husband died in 1978, but Elliff continued planting.
She’s still perfecting the garden, adding trellises and climbing roses in the past couple years. The roses start blooming in May and continue until the first frost of fall.
“It’s just a good place to grow roses,” she says. “Roses are easy to grow if you give them tender, loving care. They want food and they want water and to be pruned properly.”
Elliff used to make bouquets for St. Patrick Catholic Church in Northwest Portland. But she doesn’t usually cut flowers to bring in the house. She wants everyone to enjoy them.
Elliff’s roses and Ray’s yard, at the corner of 42nd and Klickitat, form a bit of a garden district in the neighborhood. Ray has only eight roses, saying she prefers perennials that come back on their own, like lilies and delphiniums.
“You do all this work and it makes people smile, hopefully,” Ray says.
Elliff has lived in her house since 1946, when her parents owned it. Neighbors have come and gone and it seems no one remains from the 1960’s. She especially misses the man down the street who used to walk the neighborhood with a rabbit on his shoulder, stopping to feed it dandelions along the way.
But Elliff loves her neighborhood. She also wants to get back to Fremont Fest when she feels better.
“When I find a place I love, I stay put,” she says. “I intend to stay here.”