Drawing casual visitors to Manhattan’s only active burial ground up in Washington Heights can often be a hard sell, unless of course the subject is roses.

On a recent drizzly Saturday morning a few dozen people drift through the solemn, rusted gates of Trinity Church Cemetery. Headstones poke through the hillside’s switchback like uneven rows of chipped gray teeth. But despite the setting, the crowd’s mood appears incongruously lighthearted. No one has come for a funeral, and the key speaker is not giving a sermon.

Heritage Rose District Is Country's First

“The rose is New York’s official state flower,” Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer reminds the slightly dewy gatherers. His office has partnered with the Heritage Rose Foundation to replant antique specimens of the famous flower throughout West Harlem and Washington Heights, starting in this historic 19th-century cemetery. "The Heritage Rose District project is the first of its kind in the country," the Borough President points out.

Seventeen planting sites have initially been planned to establish the heritage rose district. "Heritage" roses are described as heirloom or antique roses whose old lineage is prized as historically or genetically significant.  Starting with Trinity Church Cemetery & Mausoleum, the 2009 fall planting includes the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the Broadway Malls and the campus of the City College of New York. The 2010 spring planting includes the Hamilton Grange, Johnny Hartman Plaza and several community gardens. And additional sites are anticipated as the project gets underway.

The principal player in this rose-induction mission is Stephen Scanniello, president of the Heritage Rose Foundation and a renowned authority on the flower. Scanniello looks affably bearish as he pulls himself from the good earth to join the ceremony. His big, expressive dirt-soiled hands belie his role as the scholarly force behind this urban landscaping initiative.

Antique Roses With Historical Neighborhood Roots

“All the roses we’re planting today have a direct connection to this neighborhood,” Scanniello tells the crowd. He mentions Harison’s Yellow, a Manhattan-born shrub rose introduced around 1830 by George F. Harison, who lies in the cemetery’s Easterly Division. He has written about two medieval-era flowers, the Apothecary’s Rose and Rosa Mundi, which Dr. David Hosack, another Trinity interrant, inventoried back in 1811, around the same time the city’s street grid was being approved.

Scanniello then shows off a bushy pot of the Green Rose. Like not being able to see the forest for the trees, the flower's petals are barely distinguishable from the leaves. And it's a fragrantless oddity at that. However the flower redeems itself through an association with antislavery activity along the Underground Railroad.

"It was growing in gardens of Quakers who were transporters of slaves in Maryland," Scanniello explains. His latest of four books on roses, A Rose by Any Name: The Little-Known Lore and Deep-Rooted History of Rose Names (co-authored with Douglas Brenner), discusses a 1953 historical novel—The Green Rose of Furley Hall, by Helen Corse Barney—that placed the strange flower at the center of a legend. "It's never direct," he says, patting the soil around the newly-planted bush. "It's sort of a lore."

Such rose lore is catnip to rosarians, and Scanniello is no exception to its potency. But the cemetery’s mere four city-block radius holds an even headier appeal to him.

Rosarians Come Seemingly By the Dozen, Too

“My quest is indeed to locate as many, if not all, of the rosarians who now reside in Trinity,” Scanniello says. “There’s an unusual amount of gardeners in this cemetery, more than I've ever seen elsewhere.”

In and of itself, the rose-planting project may well have stronger cultural roots than those of conservation to New York City's old iconography. Although "Harison's Yellow" rose is said to have originated in George F. Harison's Manhattan garden, and therefore a native cultivar, the 22 other antique varieties seem to have come from elsewhere as non-native botanic emissaries. A role of no small significance, to be sure.

Still, Scanniello's quest to connect the dots between so many of his early 19th-century rose-minded forebears within so concentrated an area seems as worthy as it is fanciful. Indeed, it could well turn up one of the city’s most peculiar indexes of political, commercial and social history.