Found roses have always held a special allure for me. If you happened to read my rose story about “Beulah Blakely“, you may notice some familiar themes in “Hattie Burton” as well. At its heart, I’m drawn to the idea of someone planting and taking care of a rose year after year. Often, the conditions are difficult and require persistence. Over time, those faithful practices create a connection, and the rose becomes something more than just a plant. It can become a stand in for the person who grew it. Long after the gardener is gone, the rose remains as a living memory rooted in the soil.
For those who have not had the opportunity to visit the area around Jensen, Utah, let me try to paint the picture. Jensen is a small town in eastern Utah near the Colorado border. Surrounded by high desert, sandstone cliffs, and open ranchland, it has the quiet, remote character typical of the Colorado Plateau. The land is arid but surprisingly fertile, and many pioneers traveling west settled here in the late 1800s.
The Green River shapes much of the landscape. Flowing out of Dinosaur National Monument, it briefly takes a break from its dramatic work of carving deep canyons and surreal rock formations before resuming its relentless cutting through central and southern Utah. In this rugged country, places to cross the river are few and far between. From a geographic standpoint, Jensen happens to be one of the best.
And the river crossing in Jensen is where Hattie enters the story.
Harriet “Hattie” Terrell was born on March 11, 1867, in Nebraska. Eventually she moved west with her family to Colorado, where she met her husband, Ira Burton. In 1888, the couple continued their journey west and settled in Jensen, where they began operating a ferry across the Green River.
From the surviving photographs. and a generous amount of oral history, it’s easy to see how Hattie developed a larger-than-life reputation. When she wasn’t helping operate the ferry, she was tending the family farm or caring for the needs of her eleven children. By any measure, it was a full life. That she found time to grow roses at all seems almost miraculous.
Fortunately for us, she did.
Hattie loved her roses and managed to carve out time to care for them. Within the Burton family, one climbing rose in particular became closely associated with her. Cuttings were passed from relative to relative, carried through the years and across generations. To this day, many of Hattie’s descendants remain in the Jensen area and grow the rose as a quiet reminder of the woman who first grew it.
The rose eventually found its way to High Country Roses (which was operated in Jensen at the time by my step sister Heather and her husband Day). One of Hattie’s grandchildren just happened to be Heather and Day’s insurance agent. With an appreciation for tough roses and a little knowledge of the family story, Heather started growing “Hattie Burton” in the nursery. The rose has been part of our collection ever since.
The “Hattie Burton” rose is an elegant climber with rich pink blooms and a vigorous growth habit. The foliage is deep green and lush. Like its namesake and the rugged country it comes from, the rose is tough as nails. It shrugs off sub-zero winters and endures summers where temperatures climb well past 100°F. In many ways, it seems a fitting tribute to Hattie herself: resilient, enduring, and impossible to overlook.