Interesting Rose Facts
The rose is a truly ancient flower. Fossil specimens indicate that the flowers bloomed in what is now the American West thousands of years before the oldest known picture of a rose was painted on a Cretan wall during the Bronze Age 36 centuries ago.
The rose was the flower of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and beauty, and in Roman times it became the flower of Venus as well.
In ancient Greek literature, the rose aquired a powerful mystique. Homer wrote in the Illiad that roses decorated the shield of Achilles and the helmet of Hector when they fought their mortal duel during the Trojan War. King Midas of Phrygia, legendary possessor of the golden touch, is said to have grown magnificent 60-petaled specimens in his gardens. It is believed that many islands of the Mediterranean were once covered with wild roses, including several varieties of Rosa gallica, the oldest identifiable rose and the basic ancestor of all modern roses. The name of one island, Rhodes, in fact comes from rhodon, the Greek word for "rose". Early in their history, the seafaring Rhodians adopted the rose as their symbol, and stamped it on many of their coins, which were widely circulated and used as currency throughout the length and breadth of the Mediterranean.
The Romans enjoyed their roses which to them signified joy and pleasure as well as beauty. They were less sentimental about them than we are and used rose flowers and petals to help celebrate all sorts of Bacchanalian revels and festivals. Swags of roses were used to decorate boxes at games and rosy wreaths to adorn the brows of the winners. Romans sat on seats in litters covered with rose petals and even slept on beds of rose petals giving rise to the saying "It's not a bed of roses".
When Romans wanted to signify that a conversation was to be confidential, they hung a rose above the participants, hence the expression, Sub Rosa --under the rose, to mean a solemn pledge of secrecy.
Rose garlands, petals and chaplets were essential dinner party decorations and Cleopatra covered the floor of her banqueting hall with an 18-inch (45 cm) deep layer of rose petals when Anthony came to dine. The emperor Elagabalus managed to actually kill several of his supper guests by showering them with so many rose petals they suffocated.
Echoes of the rose's pagan past clung for a long time afterwards. It wasn't until the middle ages that the flower became respectable again and the Virgin Mary was named "the rose without thorns". Rosaries are used to count prayers to Our Lady and were made originally from pressed rose flowers which gave off scent as the beads were said; this was supposed to remind the prayer of the roses in Mary's garden. The concept of building beautiful round windows in the shape of roses was brought back from the Holy Land by the crusaders. Under the magnificent example at York Minster is written "as the rose is the flower of all flowers this is the house of all houses."
The rose is the national flower of England and stories about it are associated with many kings and queens. The striped rose, rosa mundi, was named after fair Rosamond the mistress of of Henry the II. Although their love story and the rose bower that the king made for her, were immortalized in ballads and poems she was, in fact, very unpopular with the people and the inscription carved on her tomb is not complimentary: "Here rose the graced, not rose the chaste, reposes; The scent that rises is no scent of roses."
The rose became England's national emblem during the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. The Lancastrians wore the red apothecary's rose, Rosa gallica officinalis, while the Yorkists adopted the white, Rosa alba-sempervirens, as their badge. The Tudor rose has both red and white petals to symbolize the union of the Yorks and Lancaster factions in the marriage of Henry Tudor to Elizabeth of York. The Jacobites who needed to work in secret in an attempt to get the Stewarts restored to the throne took the white rose, Rosa alba maxima, as their emblem.
France, too, has strong associations with the rose. The empress Josephine adored them and planted over 250 varieties in her garden at Malmaison. Although her garden is now in ruins, all her roses and many more can be seen in the world famous rose garden called the Roserarie de l'Hay. Redoute, the great flower portraitist, was of course French; he was commissioned by Josephine to paint her roses and his book of engravings Les Roses must still be the best known rose book in the world.
Many of the best modern roses were developed in America and several states have adopted roses as their emblem. New York state is one such and Georgia, with the white Cherokee rose, another. Iowa took a wild rose as its emblem while the district of Columbia is associated with the American Beauty Rose as is Dakota with the Prarie Rose.
Rose breeding is surrounded by an aura of romance and adventure. In 1939, when Frances Meilland found a sturdy plant with magnificent pale gold blossoms growing from one seed he had nurtured, he knew he had bred something valuable, but he had no idea how valuable--nor did he realize how long it would take him to find out. He sent cuttings to Germany, Italy, and the United States--the bundle of stems addressed to a Pennslyvania rose grower was aboard the last American plane that got out of France in November 1940, a step ahead of the invading Nazis.
Not until World War II ended 5 years later did Meilland learn that his exported cuttings had been used to propagate the rose many experts consider the best ever developed, the variety known in the U.S. as Peace. Within a decade the Peace rose was blooming on more than 30 million bushes throughout the world. "How strange to think," Meilland said, "that all these millions of rose bushes sprang from a tiny seed no bigger than the head of a pin--a seed we might so easily have overlooked or neglected in a moment of inattention, or which might have been relished as a tidbit by some hungry field mouse."
Today the rose has lost most of its more elaborate connotations, but its role as romantic ambassador continues undiminished. He who gives a single rose, or a dozen, speaks a universal language. And it may be no coincidence that June, the month of roses, has always been the month of brides.
Reference sources for the information pages:
Smith, Miranda, Your Backyard Herb Garden (Rodale Gardening, 1997)
[The Language of Flowers] [Craft for June]
[Sign Guestbook] [View Guestbook] [Mail Me] [Join Geocities]