''The Rose Garden of Peace” is a collection of roses, hundreds of different varieties of roses. It is a well-kept, loved and lived rose garden, located in front of a nursing home for elderly people in the Municipality of Induno Olona.
The rose garden was born in an area where there was a dense conifer forest, destroyed by a violent storm in the summer of 2011. The first to have the idea of replacing the trees with roses was Elio Bigi, gardener and historic florist of Induno Olona: ''Since 1913 here in the village every year in May a festival of cut roses is organised'', he says, ''therefore proposing a rose garden seemed to us the best way to honour this tradition''. In May 2013, 100 years after the first ever Rose Festival, the garden was officially opened. Today, the rose garden is made up of almost 6,500 plants, and a total of 612 different rose varieties: antique roses, English roses, climbing plants, but the largest group is Tea hybrids. Inside the garden you can admire the entire collection of statues from the 2015 Milan Expo, the so-called “Food Carriers of the Master” by the Italian scenographer and Oscar award winner Dante Ferretti.
The rose garden was received with great enthusiasm by the citizens, not only for its intrinsic beauty, but also because it allows the elderly guests of the nursing home to encounter the “external world''. This is the true added value of this special public rose garden.
In November 2018 the rose garden was awarded the ''Best Unconventional Therapy'' award by Onda, the National Observatory on Women's and Gen- der Health, because thanks to its multi-sensory qualities, the nursing home operators use the garden to treat the behavioural disturbances of the guests, such as agitation, aggression and apathy and they do so with impressive ef- ficacy. They use sense-perceptive stimulation with the different colors of the rose garden, olfactory stimulation based on the scent of the flowers, and music via the audio system that accompanies a visit to the park.
