The Dr. Robert E. Basye Garden Party is a special event held at Rosewood. The Garden Party was an inspiration for visitors to devote time and energy to cleaning up their gardens and landscapes.  The event was open to vendors, limited to garden art, plants, herbs, etc. Featured speakers covered related topics throughout the day. The Garden Party was open to the public, with free admission.   

The GARDEN PARTY is a tribute to the work of Dr. Basye. Some of Dr. Basye's roses were featured and for sale at the GARDEN PARTY on April 20. Dr. Basye lived and worked on the 50 acre property.  The open meadows were once filled with roses surrounded by woods of Oak and Cedar. The roses of the field were removed to the Texas A & M University test gardens and the rose germ plasma bank.  Dr. Basye had a life-long passion to grow and develop hundreds of different species.  He loved the roses so dearly that he never married. He worked to develop better flowers and better rose plants for those flowers to live on.  He also wanted to develop rose bushes that were thorn less, and a breeding program that would create species more immune to diseases and resistant to black spot, a fungal diseased that produces black irregular lesions on rose leaves. 

Dr. Basye was a noted researcher and hybridizer of roses.  His lifetime study of roses earned him an induction to the Horticulture Hall of Fame. His PHD was in Mathematics, and he taught Math at TAMU for over 30 years.  His degree was a great benefit in his research to divide chromosomes, and to threat plants with coltrizine, leading to the development of new species. Many of the roses he developed are famous today.  The three most popular ones are Commander Gillette, a completely thorn less rose created in 1965; Basye's Purple Rose, which blooms throughout the growing season with large, single, purple flowers with gold stamens; and Belinda's Dream, which has few disease problems. 

 Dr. Alvin J. Kutach and his wife, Honey, live on Dr. Basye's property now known as ROSEWOOD.  Dr. Basye named his favorite rose, Belinda's Dream, for Dr. Kutach's daughter. Dr. Basye's home, Rosebud Cottage, has become an elegant county Bed and Breakfast located on Rosewood property next to Rosewood Manor. 

 Dr. Basye died in 2002 at the age of 92, and his ashes are scattered where he once grew hundreds of roses in the fields at Rosewood.  He endowed a Chair in Rose Genetics at Texas A & M University in hopes that his work would continue long after he was gone, and so it has. 

 To see some of Dr. Basye's work, take a leisurely drive to the Antique Rose Emporium in Washington County between Brenham and College Station.  There, visitors can see and purchase several species created by Basye.