It’s Valentine’s Day at my house. I know it’s mid-April, but this is when my Valentine’s Day roses arrive every year. In February, when most folks are scrambling for those dozen red roses from the local florist, I go online to the Antique Rose Emporium and select the rose bushes I want, my husband’s gift to me.

Doesn’t sound romantic? No surprise gift? It’s quite all right with me. My passion (besides the romantic kind for my husband) is gardening, and I’d rather have the ever-blooming, fragrant blossoms just outside my window all summer than the cut varieties that don’t last a week in the vase.

These are no ordinary roses. They are “survivors,” long-living varieties that have lasted for decades, even centuries — Antique, Earth-Kind, Pioneer and Old Garden roses. They thrive even in the harsh conditions of my yard: clay soil and little protection from cold winter winds. Incidentally, roses have been on Earth for 35 million years and have been formally cultivated for 5,000 years (first by the Chinese).

I’ve loved roses, not for 5,000 years, but for as long as I can remember. Both my grandfathers grew them in their gardens. We recently went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and I was reminded of my childhood fascination with the Red Queen’s gardeners “painting the roses red.”

But it was a trip about 10 years ago to the rose garden at Elizabeth Park in Hartford, CT, that clinched it for me. Once I saw this magnificent and magical place, I knew I had to grow roses in my own garden. (A side note: Since then, my younger son was married at the park, and my older son had his wedding photos taken there.)

The world-famous rose garden — the oldest municipally operated rose garden in the country — consists of two-and-a-half acres featuring 800 varieties of roses that amount to 15,000 plants. Rambling roses cover arched walkways in the garden — a favorite spot for photos — and the beds are filled with roses of every shape and fragrance and color. Fences of climbing and shrub roses along the border provide a colorful background for other plants.

Elizabeth Park was born from the American Park Movement of the mid-19th century, a response to what was seen as negative influences of the Industrial Revolution. People viewed urbanization as a change for the worse for American life and sought to preserve open space. The park was created on land from the Charles Pond Estate and named for his wife, Elizabeth.

It seems wherever I travel, I seek out gardens. I’ve been known to insist on a detour to a park — in Portland, Ore., I made my husband and sons spend an entire afternoon at the Rose Garden — or rush through a castle tour just to get to the splendidly secret walled garden, like the one at Bunratty Castle near Shannon, Ireland. I’ve even based my decision on where to stay on the plantings: My reasoning is that if the owners of a B&B are nurturing enough to tend a garden, they’ll also know how to tend to their guests.

The style of garden doesn’t much matter. I’ve been equally mesmerized by the intricate patterns and hedge mazes of the formal Renaissance gardens at Chateau de Villandry in the Loire Valley and the more naturalized botanical garden and arboretum at Cornell Plantation.

What does matter is that someone has taken the time to plant an artistic array of color and aroma, and I have time to, well, stop and smell the roses.

— Jan Hecht, associate editor