When this year's Rose Queen walked onto the stage on Thursday night in her jeweled gown with a 16-foot train, she became part of a tradition dating to 1933, when this East Texas town may have actually deserved its nickname, ''Rose Capital of the Nation.''

Tourists from across the state and the nation, and even from some foreign countries, come to the annual Texas Rose Festival, which reaches a crescendo in a Saturday morning parade featuring floats heavy with roses that carry elaborately costumed duchesses, ladies in waiting and, of course, the queen.

But the festival is rapidly becoming the most colorful part of Tyler's rose industry. The days when most of the bushes containing red, yellow and pink roses sold in this country were grown on this sandy stretch of Texas prairie are long gone. Today, if a local man makes his living in roses, he is just as likely to do it packaging rose bushes grown elsewhere -- in California or Arizona, perhaps.

Only 10 to 15 major growers are left of the literally hundreds who grew roses here in the late 1950's, when Tyler produced more than 20 million bushes a year.