You could make the case that Point Defiance Park is all the monument Ebenezer Rhys Roberts needs. He came to it in 1889 and, until 1908, shaped its gardens, trails and woodlands into a legacy we all enjoy today.

But without more traditional monuments, we forget the specifics, the names, dates, ties to places. Anyone who’s ever stopped to read about the stately bronze guy looking over the bowl and gardens at Point Defiance knows Congressman Francis Cushman won the transfer of the park’s land from federal to local ownership in 1905.

That bronze note does not mention that over the prior 15 years, Roberts had pushed and pressed Cushman to get the deed to Point Defiance from the feds. He’d done the work that made the park irresistibly beautiful to Tacomans.

He asked children to bring cuttings from their families’ rose bushes, and he created the first Point Defiance Rose Garden out of those starts. He rowed up Hood Canal to capture wild rhodies for the park’s rhododendron gardens. He created playgrounds in neighborhood parks, and brought flowers and plantings to the new Lincoln, Ferry and McKinley parks. He wrote a popular horticulture column for The Tacoma News and Ledger.

The hard-working Welshman was the garden star in a flower-crazy town.

When he died, the city eulogized and mourned him, but no one put words to granite on his behalf. Without such a reminder, he faded from civic memory over the next eight decades.

Then, Metro Parks’ Doreen Beard Simpkins and Melissa McGinnis dug up his story as they prepared for Point Defiance’s centennial.

They fell hard for the gardener who named three of his children Trillium, Woodland and Reseda (a genus of flowers). They marveled at his whimsical nature, the power of his persistence, his devotion to parks.

“Ebenezer was able to work with all these people, the politicians, the loftier design minds,” Simpkins said. “He was the one who lived in the park, lived, ate and breathed Point Defiance. He carried out the plans. He was the one with dirt under his fingernails. He was the city’s master gardener.”

On the eve of the first Point Defiance Flower & Garden Show in 2005, Simpkins cut roses from her garden and, with colleague Bill Rhind went to Tacoma Cemetery to lay them on the graves of their park heroes.

Christopher Engh, funeral service counselor for New Tacoma Cemeteries and Funeral Home, directed them to Cushman’s grave, then to the spot where Roberts, his wife, Mary, and their daughter Reseda were buried. There was no stone. Simpkins searched the area, then Engh researched the records. There never had been one.

Engh, a member of Tacoma Historical Society, decided that was just wrong.

He contacted Roberts’ granddaughter, Jean Insel Robeson of Gig Harbor. She had not known of the omission and gave him her blessing to remedy it.

Premier Memorial offered a headstone at cost and the engraving for free. Cemetery President Jack Harding approved the purchase and installation of the memorial, and the women of PEO Chapter CA donated $140 to the project. Robeson consulted on the form and wording. Engh estimates the value of the granite headstone with a vase on either side at close to $6,000.

Friday, in the shady spot where her grandparents and aunt lie, Robeson unveiled the memorial.

“E.R. Roberts,” it reads. “Creator of Tacoma Parks & Gardens. 1854-1918”

Below those lines are the dates for Mary and Reseda Roberts, Ebenezer’s wife and daughter.

“To him, gardening was the ultimate profession,” Robeson said of her grandfather. “Tacoma is that much more beautiful because he lived and worked here.”

Tacoma Historical Society president Dale Wirsing reminded the several dozen Roberts admirers at the unveiling that the man touched parks throughout the city and lobbied for construction of Seymour Conservatory in Wright Park.

“Mr. Roberts went every day to the mayor’s office with an armload of flowers and said, ‘This is what we can do with a conservatory,’” Wirsing said.

Tacoma’s tropical treasure under glass is a testament to the persuasive double whammy of Roberts and his blossoms.

Engh smiled as McGinnis and Simpkins put the first flowers into the granite vases.

“We want people to be able to put roses there,” Engh said. “If folks want to pay their respects to Mr. Roberts over Memorial Day, they are welcome.”

They’d be welcome any day, for that matter, with any flowers.

Roses, poppies, daisies, bleeding hearts, bring them all to the cemetery at 4801 South Tacoma Way, then bear left on Topping way to the new headstone.

It would please Ebenezer so to see what you love to grow. It would delight him to know that Tacoma is still a garden-crazy town and that you want him know you appreciate his parks.