Autumn Season at Keisei Rose Garden

Keisei Rose Garden gives over the weeks from the middle of October to late November to its autumn season, when the roses flower for the second time in the year. The garden is run by the nursery company of the same name and has been building attractions on Alice in Wonderland for several years. Each autumn the season is given a new name and a new centrepiece, with the rest of it much as it was.

The autumn roses

Roses come out again in autumn after the main flush of early summer, and the garden calls this second flowering the encore bloom. The cooler air holds the scent, so these are described as the one peak scent season of the year.

New varieties are shown for the first time each autumn as well. The garden calls them Rose Nouveau, after the Beaujolais released in the same weeks, and they are seen here before anywhere else.

The Alice attractions

Alice Tours is a ride through a wood in a four-wheeled electric vehicle that the visitor pedals, twelve minutes long, past a tea party laid out by the Mad Hatter and a dragon to be fed.

A small castle stands in the branches of a hackberry above the pond, about three metres up. At weekends one party a day who finds the Queen of Hearts' invitation, hidden somewhere different each time, has the castle to themselves for a quarter of an hour with rose tea and something sweet.

The great glasshouse holds a carousel whose riders fire bubbles, and a permanent work made with an art collective: a dome six metres across with an egg-shaped core inside it, roses set into the core.

Halloween

On Saturdays in late October the garden stays open into the evening, and some of the roses, the carousel and the glasshouse work are lit. Through the same weeks jack-o'-lanterns are set about the garden with lucky ones hidden among them, which are exchanged for a small prize, and marshmallows are toasted at a tent behind the glasshouse.

The 2026 season

The 2026 season is called White Rabbit's Royal Invitation. Its new piece is a carriage of the Queen of Hearts, six seats, built by a team who make scenery for theme parks and set down as somewhere to sit and be photographed. Seven roses are released as the year's Rose Nouveau.

Two places added earlier in the year open on Sundays: a drinks hut kept by the Cheshire Cat beside the glasshouse, and next to it a terrace raised above the beds, which is the highest point in the garden to sit and look down at the roses.

Dogs are allowed in for the first time this rose season, on a few set days and wheeled in a pet cart, with two of those days given to dogs in costume.