Coming up roses

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet ... " Shakespeare once wrote, unwittingly creating the most famous flower quotation in history.

Certainly, no other plant has captured the imagination quite like the rose, which bloomed innumerable times in literature and painting and has come to stand for the contrasting qualities of love, eroticism, innocence, piety and even martyrdom.

Nor is the liking for roses merely an artistic conceit; ordinary people have embraced their beauty, perfume and velvety colours for thousands of years. Quite possibly the most common plant in gardens - and certainly the most sought - after in florist shops - the rose it truly the Queen of flowers.

The story of roses starts about 30-million years ago fossil records showing that they were widespread right across the northern hemisphere, even adapting themselves to marshes and deserts.

These original wild roses nearly all blossomed in spring and had single flowers of five petals, a trait shared with plums, pears, peaches, apples and strawberries, to which they're related (they now share the same botanical family, Roseaceae).

Roses became a part of human society at an early time, at least 4,000 years ago. Architectural decoration inspired by roses is found on the ruins of Assyria and Babylon, as well as in frescos on the walls of the Palace of Knossos in Crete. Coins minted as early as the fifth century BC in Rhodes also have rose motifs - rhodon is Greek for rose. However, the oldest known actual roses date from 170 AD and were discovered in dried wreaths in tombs at Hawara in Egypt.

It's hard to determine when roses were first cultivated, but it w as certainly in the Middle East. Cultivation centred on five of the 200 or so wild varieties: the red (or later 'French') rose, the white rose, the cabbage rose, the musk rose and the damask rose, whose name derives from the city of Damascus.

Musk and damask roses were particularly prized for their heavy scent and were grown on a wide scale in ancient Persia, where they were used to produce attar of roses, an essential oil for perfumes.

The ancient Greeks also grew them commercially, the philosopher and botanist Theophrastus writing at length about their propagation and care. His entry on roses in his Inquiry into Plants begins: "Among roses there are many differences in the number of petals,in roughness, in beauty of colour, and in sweetness of scent..." It's clear that roses had also made it into private gardens, for Herodotus noted that roses grew around the palace of King Midas, 'each bearing 60 blossoms and of surpassing fragrance".

The Romans were equally passionate about the flower, bathing in rosewater and even using the petals in the kitchen: nearly a 100 Roman recipes call for their use. The emperors took their liking to extremes: Nero, for one, spent two-million sestertii covering an entire beach at Naples with petals on a whim and routinely had showers of rose petals dropped on the heads of guests at banquets.

Roses were also hung above the dining table as a reminder to guests that the conversation there was confidential - roses being taken as symbols of secrecy. Today the Latin term sub rose, literally 'under the rose', still refers to the Roman belief and to secret or private affairs.

More importantly, perhaps, it was the Greeks who first imbued the rose with allegorical meaning. On the one hand, roses were associated with purity and innocence and used in temples during religious ceremonies; on the other hand they paradoxically stood for sensuality and love.

Dionysius (god of wine) and Eros (god of love) were often depicted wearing wreaths of roses, Eros' mother Aphrodite was supposedly born from the waves, and where the waves broke on the seashore roses grew, a scene notably), captured later in Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

Thus roses entered western culture as a duel symbol of human nature: purity and innocence on the one hand (the white rose), and desire and lust on the other (the red rose).

After the fall of Rome roses fell out of favouring Europe, associated as they were with decadent excess and pagan-religion. They survived only in the gardens of monasteries, where they were grown for their supposed medicinal value.

Only the incorporation of rose symbolism into the Christian religion revived its fortunes in Europe. Love and beauty were still celebrated, but this time in the pure form of the Virgin Mary rather than the voluptuous form of Aphrodite. Blood-red roses could also symbolise the martyrdom of Christ, particularly as the flower's petals were the same in number as the five wounds of Christ on the cross.

One of the most celebrated books of the Middle Ages was The Romance of the Rose, a long poetical allegory about the Christian religion. Today the string of beads used for prayer by Catholics is still referred to as a rosary (from the Latin rosaria, literally, 'rose garden'). this kind of imagery was paralleled in the Middle East, where the introduction of Islam had also brought roses into religious use; in Sufism the rose symbolised the union and understanding of God.

The revived fortunes of the rose meant that the flower once more became widespread, and thus gradually secularised. In Arab society it was a flavoured motif on carpets and in miniatures; in Europe it was widely painted by the Dutch masters and in literature came to suggest romantic as well as religious love.

It was also an important heraldic device much favoured by aristocratic houses, most notably those of York (white rose) and Lancaster (red rose) in England. In Henry VI Part I Shakespeare poetically - but inaccurately - ascribes these symbols to the plucking of flowers in a garden during a quarrel that led to the Wars of the Roses.

In 1485 at the end of the Civil War the two factions were united under the new House of Tudor, which took as its symbol a small white rose surmounted on a red one. Today this remains the emblem of English royalty. The rose is also the official flower of England - as it is for the USA (and four of its states), Iran, Iraq, the Maldives and Bulgaria. In fact, Bulgaria is a world power when it comes to roses, producing 80 percent of the world's supply of attar for the perfume industry.

Until the 18th century all these lauded roses were still of the five original varieties first cultivated a millennium earlier, and came only in white, red and pink shades. All that was to change, however, with the arrival of two new varieties from the Orient, the China rose and tea rose, which not only flowered repeatedly throughout the summer but came in a variety of colours, including the hitherto unknown yellow. (These had been grown in China for many centuries; as far back as the fifth century BC. Confucius noted there were at least 600 books on roses in the collections of the Imperial Library and commented on the extensive rose plantings in the palaces of the capital.)

The first China rose arrived in Sweden from Canton in 1752. It was hybridization of these Oriental species with traditional species, creating varieties such as Bourbon, Portland and Noisette roses, which transformed the rose world and created the modern roses we recognise today.

Among the most famous collections of hybrids in its day was that at the Chateau de Malmaison outside Paris.

Its owner, the Empress Josephine, had avowed to collect all the known varieties of roses and succeeded in accumulating 250 hybrids in a garden devoted entirely to roses. Later, these were illustrated by Pirre-Joseph Redoute, formerly flower-painter to Queen Marie-Antointte, whose superb book Les Roses published between 1817 and 1824 remains unsurpassed on the subject.

It was the French who became leaders of the hybridization process and laid claim to having the world's best roses throughout the 19th century. (Their domination of the business only waned after the First World War with increasing competition from England, Ireland and Germany.) Indeed, the year in which the modern rose is said to have been born was 1867, at a horticultural show in Lyons.

Here a competition was announced to find a flower worthy to be named La France; the winner was a large pink blossom with curving petals, which combined the best traits of several hybrids.

These days there are some 4,000 hybrids. There has also recently been a resurgence in interest in old roses - the original five cultivated species - which although they only bloom once in the season have a wonderful fragrance and sense of history.

In the 20th century the rose truly entered the common culture, from the best-selling novel The Name of the Rose to the tumbling petals of the movie American Beauty. In Titanic there seemed no other suitable name but Rose for the vulnerable and beautiful heroine, with the flowers themselves appearing several times in the blockbuster movie.

Roses are particularly celebrated in song: 'Days of Wine and Roses', Everything's Coming up Roses', 'The Last Rose of Summer' and the 'Yellow Rose of Texas' are among the 4,000 titles associated with the flower.

Nowadays the rose's association is more romantic than anything else and roses sell in prodigious quantities around Valentine's Day.

Love is indeed like a red, red rose, as Scottish poet Robert Burns famously put it. Then again, romantic failures can fall back on the excuse that 'I didn't Promise you a Rose Garden' and try to improve things by sending some 'Red Roses for a Blue Lady'.

Roses, it seems, are everywhere, from home furnishings to fashion and song. And why not? Beautiful and fragrant, poetic and fragile, the Queen of Flowers can indeed make us believe, if only for a while, that life is indeed a bed of roses.

Courtesy Serendib