The first burst of color is showing on Marion Ruth Rogel's rose arbor in Center City. A curvaceous, cream-colored bud, tipped in pink, has appeared near the front door.

That's just the beginning.

In a few weeks, her brick rowhouse will be covered in roses with such names as New Dawn and Eden. Red, white and pink, they'll cascade over the pergola, climb the latticework, spring up in the planter bed out front.

It will infuriate neighbors on historic St. James Street near Rittenhouse Square. At least some of them.

The problem is not the flowers but the structures Rogel, 70, a retired teacher, has put up to support them.

"The roses are lovely," said a neighbor who said she would not give her name for fear of a confrontation. "It's the encroachment that is the real problem."

The architectural committee of the Philadelphia Historical Commission has said the pergola, trellis and planter should go.

"All the committee members thought the amount of lattice work covered too much of the historic building and found the pergola at odds with the design of the building," the committee wrote early this month.

Rogel isn't giving up. This morning, she and her lawyer, Bernard Nearey, will appear before the full 14-member Historical Commission, which is expected to issue a ruling on the spot.

"All I'm guilty of is providing beauty," Rogel said.

Except some neighbors in English Village, an eye-catching urban oasis off 22d Street, don't see it that way.

Rogel's arbors and planter detract from the quaint community's historic air, they contend.

The homes were built in the 1920s, each with its own architectural style. They are fronted by gardens, which at this time of year are lush with ivy, ablaze with the crimson, purple, orange and yellow of spring blossoms. Japanese maples and flowering trees provide a canopy over the lane, the last in the city paved with bluestone.

When Rogel bought her Tudor revival home there in 1995, she went to work almost immediately on the garden. She put up brown latticework on the front of her home so rose vines would have a place to climb. Then came the pergola, an arborlike structure, on the side.

"I always wanted to live on this street," she said.

More recently, she enlarged the planter box out front. Made of garden timbers, it measures more than 5 by 13 feet. And it does, in fact, jut into the gently curving stone walkway. She said that the bed was temporary and that she had agreed to scale it back.

All of the changes were meant to create a habitat for her beloved roses.

"I love roses because they come back every year," Rogel said. "They're very faithful, very faithful."

Said Nearey, her lawyer: "When those roses bloom, it knocks your socks off."

Roses aren't what made the biggest impression on some neighbors.

Last summer, a resident of English Village alerted the Historical Commission to the changes Rogel had made to her property. Richard Tyler, the city's historic-preservation officer, said the commission sent a representative to inspect the property, then asked the Department of Licenses and Inspections to issue a citation.

"This work was done without permits," Tyler said. "It is work that would require a permit."

The property lies within the Rittenhouse-Fitler Residential Historic District, and changes must be approved in advance, said Andrea Swan, spokeswoman for L&I.

Nearey said he would argue that the Historical Commission is overstepping its bounds, interfering in "an intramural dispute" among neighbors over changes to private property.

"It boggles the mind that a bureaucracy can come down on someone over roses, and the same bureaucracy can sit on its hands on some of the big historic-preservation issues out there," he said. "Growing roses cannot possibly be asserted to be a denigration of the historic fabric."

In a petition to the Historical Commission signed by some residents of English Village, neighbors asked that Rogel be required to remove the pergola and trellis and to restore the planter to its original dimensions.

"They'll try to make me take the trellis off the front of my house, and I'll have to chop all my roses down," Rogel said. "Then I'll have to do a lot of screaming."

Elsbeth Brown-Parr, a neighbor of Rogel's, is surprised the quarrel has gone this far.

"I think it comes down to a personality conflict," Brown-Parr said. "She doesn't waste a lot of time trying to be politically correct."

Brown-Parr points out that the aluminum screen doors and energy-efficient windows on some neighborhood homes aren't historically correct either, but said no one had made an issue of those.

"This is some kind of group pressure," said Rogel, who taught in Philadelphia public schools for 20 years. "I will not yield to group pressure."

If the Historical Commission rules against her, Rogel said, she will appeal.

"More often than not, the commission adopts the recommendation of the committee," Tyler said. "But that's not to say the commission will invariably do so."

Rogel, meanwhile, is making plans to enhance the annual show of color outside her rowhouse. She has a dozen new plants on order, and this week, she got an early Mother's Day gift: two red rose bushes.

She is firm about one thing: "I'm going to put them in."

The Philadelphia Historical Commission stepped in yesterday with a compromise to resolve a gardening dispute that has divided neighbors on an elegant half-block of homes near Rittenhouse Square.

Overruling an advisory committee's recommendation, the commission ordered Marion Ruth Rogel, 70, to scale back her rose-growing accoutrements: an arbor, a planter box that juts into a walkway, and brown latticework she installed on the front of her brick rowhouse.

The red, white and pink roses can stay.

The commission's architecture committee last week recommended that all Rogel's gardening fixtures be taken out.

"I felt that today there was a substantial victory," Rogel said after the hearing.

Added her lawyer, Bernard Nearey: "It's a major victory for rational thinking."

Neighbor Nikki Marx seemed satisfied, too.

At the hearing she told commission members that the biggest concern was the planter box, and afterward she said that "the commission appeared to take care of that."

Rogel, a retired teacher, moved to the 2100 block of St. James Street eight years ago. The neighborhood, called English Village, comprises 20 cottages of varying styles arrayed on either side of a sweeping bluestone walkway and fronted by free-form gardens.

She first put up lattice on the front of her home for her climbing roses. Then she erected a pergola, or arbor, with large curved ends. Last summer, she enlarged the stone planter bed out front, framing it with garden timbers.

That's when a neighbor informed the Historical Commission, which inspected the property and asked the Department of Licenses and Inspections to cite Rogel for altering a home in a historic district without approval.

Neighbors said they feared that if Rogel were allowed to enlarge the planter in front of her house, nothing would stop other homeowners from doing the same. "And suddenly we have gardens in the middle of the street and no way to walk through," Marx told the commission.

Historical Commission member Scott Wilds fashioned the compromise after visiting Rogel's property on his way to yesterday morning's hearing.

"I went into it with mixed emotions," Wilds said, "as a gardener and a commissioner."

As the commission was about to vote on Wilds' proposal, Marx raised a concern about the latticework, saying, "It's only pretty for about three months out of the year," but was cut off by commission chairman Michael Sklaroff.

"It's too late for that," he said.