Karen and I began our two-week adventure on July 31, 2025, in the Pacific Northwest, with Portland as our first base for exploration. Mount Hood appears to float in the background above the “Rose City,” like a silent sentinel.
The Portland Rose Garden in Washington Park has been the testing ground for new rose varieties for 100 years. The garden boasts 10,000 rose bushes and over 600 varieties.
As the oldest testing ground, it should not have surprised me to see roses grafted onto grapevine rootstock. The method results in better disease resistance and quicker blooming flowers.
The rose garden is free and open daily. When we finished smelling roses, a short hike up the hill took us to the Portland Japanese Garden.
After sampling the ambrosia of a world-class rose garden, the tranquility of Portland’s 12-acre sanctuary Japanese Garden, was lackluster. Sapporo, Japan, is Portland’s sister city, and the garden has been a cross-cultural exchange and site for community relaxation since 1963.
Continuing our flower-festooned day, we headed for Canby, Oregon, a 40-minute drive from downtown Portland. The Swan Island Dahlia Festival has become the world’s most renowned exhibit of dazzling dahlias.
The Swan Island location is situated on 40 acres, overspread with 375 varieties of fabulous dahlias and a smattering of Lavender for extra color and bee happiness.
Cheers! To the United States’ largest and most important dahlia grower since the 1940s.
The Swan Island farm features an international test garden and offers classes, teaching ordinary folks like you and me to grow incredible dahlias, such as this stunner.
A cool surprise at the Dahlia Festival was a large tented area in the parking lot with several dozen 10-foot-diameter pools exhibiting exotic koi fish for contest judging and for sale. Buying a koi is much better than coming home from the fair with a goldfish in a baggie.
Returning to Portland from the Dahlia Festival, we passed through Oregon City, the ending point for pioneers on the Oregon Trail. Surrounded by defunct woolen, flour, and paper mills is horseshoe-shaped Willamette Falls, the second largest waterfall by volume in the Northwest U.S. At a whopping 1,500 feet wide and 40 feet high, it’s crazy that I never heard of this place. The sign at the lookout point by the road said the fall had been closed to the public for 150 years, and now public development is in progress to restore this abandoned-factory-encircled predicament to a beautiful work of nature.
The morning before leaving Portland, we checked out the Portland Saturday Market. The website claims it is “Nationally recognized as the longest continuously operating open-air arts and crafts market in the country.”
The market takes place in Portland’s South Waterfront Community and was filled with surprises, like this booth for handmade globe decorations created from an old boat, trailer, and whimsical additions. The very chill owner said, “It all folds into itself for easy transport.
I’m ending this segment of our Pacific Northwest adventure with a reminder to “Stop and smell the roses, but make sure a bee is not harvesting pollen inside the bloom.”