The park employed gardeners year-round to ensure impressive summer landscaping. The Oaks boasted its magnificent collection of Oregon roses even before Portland was graced with the prominent Rose Test Garden in City Park (now Washington Park) in 1917. Articles and advertisements called attention to the four-thousand-plus rose bushes that Oaks gardeners placed in curves and rows within the grounds.

Oaks management used the park's natural environment to strengthened its claim that The Oaks was a moral and healthful place to be, fit for all classes of patrons. When visitors needed a break from the flashing lights and excitement of the commercial section of the park, they would only need to stroll along one of the park’s many landscaped paths to recuperate.

The idea that nature promoted morality and health was a popular ideology of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Increasing industrialization led to the growth of overpopulated city centers that were unsanitary, dark, and crime-ridden. The influx of immigrants contributed to a city-life culture that was much different from the face-to-face rural living conditions that were more common only a short time before.

These new social conditions were unsettling to some members of the upper and middle classes. Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park in 1858, wrote about the benefits of city parks. Olmsted reasoned that the therapeutic effect of nature would remedy the feeling of being stifled by the stagnant air and lack of sunlight among the narrow, crowded city streets.

To Olmsted, city parks were more than places to enjoy nature. They also had the potential to increase camaraderie between social classes and to uplift working class culture to the standards of the middle class. They were places where strangers, who on a city street would pass each other by for a perceived lack of something in common, could meet and recognize the shared satisfaction they get from nature.

Further, in his essays Olmsted described how parks offered members of the working class a recreational alternative to loitering in groups on the streets, an activity he considered to be disreputable and contrary to the social uplift they could receive while mingling with the “better classes” in ordered public spaces.

The Oaks' early advertisements and promotional articles reflected the ideas of Olmsted and other park enthusiasts of the time.

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