Rose

• 1. Introduction

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  A rose, the flower of the woody plant genus Rosa, gives up its scent very sparingly. Distillers need about two thousand blossoms to yield a single gram of rose oil. People have been willing to pay that price for a very long time, and it says a lot about how much they have wanted this plant. The petals run from white through pinks and reds to oranges and yellows. Some stems trail along the ground, while climbers reach up to 7 m. Yet the plant that fills vases is also hooked, armed and tough, and its history runs far behind the garden wall. Why do botanists object when people call its sharp growths thorns? Where does the name come from, and how old are the oldest remains? And how did one plant end up beside goddesses, saints, kings and perfumers alike?

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• 2. Prickles and Petals

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  The sharp growths along a rose stem are called thorns by almost everyone, but botanists prefer the word prickles. A prickle is an outgrowth of the epidermis, the outer layer of tissue on the stem. A true thorn, by contrast, is a modified stem. Most rose prickles are sickle-shaped hooks, and they help the plant cling to other vegetation as it scrambles over it.

  Rosa rugosa and R. pimpinellifolia carry densely packed straight prickles instead. These probably discourage browsing animals. They may also trap wind-blown sand, which would reduce erosion and protect the roots, since both species grow naturally on coastal sand dunes. The defence is far from perfect, because deer still browse roses often. A few species have only vestigial prickles with no points at all.

  At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the plant geneticist Zachary Lippman found that prickles are controlled by the LOG gene. When the gene was blocked in roses, the large prickles shrank into tiny buds.

  Most wild roses have five petals, and each petal is divided into two distinct lobes. The exceptions are Rosa omeiensis and Rosa sericea, which usually have only four. Petals are typically white or pink, though a few species are yellow or red. Beneath them sit five sepals, or four in those same two species. Seen from above, the sepals can look like green points between the rounded petals. The petals form a cup or disc around the gynoecium, the central part of the flower that holds the ovaries.

  The leaves of most species measure 5 to 15 cm and are pinnate, usually with five to nine leaflets that have serrated margins. They are borne alternately along the stem. Most roses are deciduous, though a few, particularly from Southeast Asia, are evergreen or nearly so.

  Inside that cup, several ovaries are already preparing to ripen into something quite unlike a petal.

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• 3. Hips and Hungry Birds

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  In nature, roses are pollinated by insects, and a fertilized ovary swells into a berry-like aggregate fruit called a hip. The hips of most species are red. Rosa pimpinellifolia is one of the few that turn dark purple to black. Each hip has a fleshy outer layer called the hypanthium. Inside it are between 5 and 160 seeds, which are technically dry single-seeded fruits known as achenes, packed among fine but stiff hairs.

  The dog rose, Rosa canina, and the rugosa rose, R. rugosa, produce hips that are among the richest plant sources of vitamin C. Birds benefit too. Thrushes and waxwings eat the hips and scatter the seeds in their droppings, while finches, in particular, go after the seeds themselves.

  Many domestic cultivars never form hips at all. Their flowers are so tightly packed with petals that insects cannot reach the centre to pollinate them. Those plants can only be propagated through cuttings made by people, which means their survival depends entirely on gardeners.

  The oldest remains of the genus, however, belong to a time long before any gardener existed.

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• 4. Deep Roots

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  The oldest remains of roses come from the Late Eocene Florissant Formation of Colorado. By the early Oligocene, roses were already present in Europe. The fossil record therefore places the genus on two continents long before any garden was planted.

  The English name has a trail of its own. It comes from Latin rosa, which was perhaps borrowed from Oscan, and which traces back to Greek rhódon, with the Aeolic form wródon. The Greek word was itself borrowed from Old Persian wrd-, also written wurdi. That root is related to Avestan varəδa, Sogdian ward and Parthian wâr.

  Today's garden roses descend from 18th-century China, through the imported Rosa chinensis. Among the old Chinese garden roses, the Old Blush group is the most primitive, while the newer groups are the most diverse. A genome study found that genes for DNA damage repair and stress adaptation have been positively selected, likely during domestication. The researchers suggested that this rapid change may reflect the strain of frequent hybridization within and between species, along with shifting growing conditions. Different species cross easily, and breeders have exploited that for the wide range of garden roses.

  The genus Rosa holds between 140 and 180 species, and most are native to Asia. Smaller numbers come from Europe, North America and Northwest Africa. Botanists divide the genus into four subgenera. Hulthemia contains two species from Southwest Asia, Rosa persica and Rosa berberifolia, the only roses without compound leaves or stipules. Hesperrhodos, from the Greek for western rose, holds Rosa minutifolia and Rosa stellata from North America.

  Platyrhodon, named for the Greek words for flaky rose, refers to the flaky bark of its single East Asian species, Rosa roxburghii, also called the chestnut rose. Every other rose belongs to the subgenus Rosa, which is itself split into 11 sections. One of them, Laevigatae, contains a single white-flowered species from China.

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• 5. Gardens and Markets

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  Roses were being cultivated for ornament by at least 500 BC, in Mediterranean countries, Persia and China. Most ornamental roses today are hybrids bred for their flowers. A few, mostly species roses, are valued for other features. Rosa glauca and R. rubiginosa are grown for attractive or scented foliage, R. sericea for ornamental thorns, and R. moyesii for showy fruit. Most garden roses are double-flowered, meaning many or all of the stamens have turned into extra petals. Breeders and gardeners have bred and selected an estimated 30 to 35 thousand hybrids and cultivars for the garden.

  In the early 19th century, the Empress Josephine of France patronized rose breeding at her gardens at Malmaison. By 1840, the Loddiges nursery had planted a rosarium of more than one thousand cultivars, varieties and species for Abney Park Cemetery in England, an early Victorian garden cemetery and arboretum.

  The cut-flower trade works on a very different scale. Growers harvest roses while they are still in bud and hold them in refrigerated conditions until they reach the point of sale. Price depends on traits of the rose, such as stem length and bloom size, and on how and where it was grown, including the country of origin. In temperate climates, cut roses are often raised in greenhouses. In warmer countries, growers may still use cover to protect the flowers from weather and to keep pest control effective. Significant quantities come from tropical countries and travel by air to markets around the world. Some roses, like the so-called rainbow roses, are artificially coloured with dyed water.

  Cover and control matter because cultivated roses suffer badly from insect, arachnid and fungal pests and diseases. In many cases they cannot be grown usefully without regular treatment. Wild roses host many of the same troubles, and these often affect other genera in the family Rosaceae too.

  The petals that growers protect so carefully have another life entirely, in the still and the kitchen.

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• 6. Perfume and Plate

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  Attar of roses, also called rose oil, is a mixture of volatile essential oils made by steam distilling crushed petals. Rose water is a companion product used in cooking, cosmetics, medicine and religious practices. The technique originated in Persia, then spread through Arabia and India, and more recently into eastern Europe.

  In Bulgaria, Iran and Germany, producers use damask roses, Rosa × damascena 'Trigintipetala'. In other parts of the world, Rosa × centifolia is the usual choice. The oil is transparent and pale yellow or yellow-grey. A different product, Rose Absolute, is extracted with the solvent hexane and gives a darker oil, from dark yellow to orange. The main fragrant components of attar are the alcohols geraniol and L-citronellol, along with rose camphor, an odourless solid that separates from the oil. The compound β-Damascenone also contributes strongly to the scent.

  In the kitchen, hips are usually taken from R. canina and eaten raw once the irritant hairs are removed. They are made into jam, jelly, marmalade and soup, brewed as tea, or pressed and filtered into rose hip syrup. Rose hip seed oil goes into skin products and some makeup. The historic Greek name diarrhodon, meaning a compound of roses, once covered various preparations that included red roses.

  Rose water has a distinctive flavour that defines many Middle Eastern, Persian and South Asian sweets. These include Turkish delight, barfi, baklava, halva, gulab jamun, knafeh and nougat. Across the Indian subcontinent, gulkand is a sweet preserve of rose petals, Rooh Afza is a popular concentrated squash made with roses, and rose-flavoured ice cream and kulfi are favourites. In France, rose syrup made from petal extract is common. In the United Kingdom, rose creams are a traditional confection, a rose-flavoured fondant covered in chocolate and often topped with a crystallised petal.

  Petals and buds can flavour ordinary tea or blend into herbal teas, and even the leaves and washed roots sometimes go into the pot. The flower stems and young shoots are edible, as are petals once the white or green bases are removed. In the United States, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act lists only certain Rosa species, varieties and parts as generally recognized as safe. The named species include Rosa alba, Rosa centifolia, Rosa damascena and Rosa gallica.

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• 7. Gods and Saints

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  In the Iliad, the goddess Aphrodite protects the body of Hector with the "immortal oil of the rose". The archaic Greek lyric poet Ibycus praises a beautiful youth whom Aphrodite nursed "among rose blossoms". The second-century AD travel writer Pausanias linked the rose to the story of Adonis. He wrote that the flower is red because Aphrodite wounded herself on one of its thorns and stained it with her blood.

  Book Eleven of The Golden Ass, a Roman novel by Apuleius, puts the rose at the centre of a rescue. The goddess Isis, who is identified with Venus, tells the hero Lucius, who has been turned into a donkey, to eat rose petals from a crown worn by a priest in a religious procession. Doing so restores his humanity. A later myth was invented by the French writer René Rapin. In it, a Corinthian queen named Rhodanthe, meaning "she with rose flowers", is besieged inside a temple of Artemis by three suitors who want to worship her as a goddess. The god Apollo then transforms her into a rosebush.

  After the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the rose became identified with the Virgin Mary. The colour of a rose and the number of roses given carry symbolic meaning. The flower eventually helped inspire the rosary and other devotional prayers. The Rose Cross places the flower directly inside the Christian cross, and it gives its name to the esoteric order of Rosicrucianism.

  Since the 1400s, the Franciscans have kept a Crown Rosary of the Seven Joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the 1400s and 1500s, the Carthusians promoted the idea of sacred mysteries tied to the rose symbol and to rose gardens. Albrecht Dürer's painting The Feast of the Rosary, from 1506, shows the Virgin Mary handing garlands of roses to her devotees.

  One more Greek tradition belongs to Eros, the god of love, for whom the rose is a sacred flower. In this telling, Eros caused the first rose to sprout on Earth, and every other flower and herb followed.

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• 8. Emblems and Art

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  During the Wars of the Roses, the Houses of York and Lancaster each took a rose as their symbol. Roses of the matching colours later became emblems of the English counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Tudor rose merges the two colours, and it became an emblem of the Tudor dynasty and of England.

  Roses are a favourite subject across art, appearing in portraits, illustrations, stamps, ornaments and architectural details. The Luxembourg-born Belgian artist and botanist Pierre-Joseph Redouté is known for detailed watercolours of flowers, especially roses. Henri Fantin-Latour was a prolific still-life painter whose subjects included roses, and the rose 'Fantin-Latour' was named after him. Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir also painted roses.

  In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation making the rose the floral emblem of the United States. The rose is exchanged on St. Valentines Day as a sign of love. Red roses are tied to romantic affection, while a yellow rose signals platonic love. For that reason, yellow roses have also become popular symbols of aromantic people.

  In Japanese, the word for rose was historically a slur for men who love men, roughly like the English word pansy. Beginning in the 1960s, Japanese gay media took the word back. Examples include a 1961 collection of semi-nude photographs of the writer Yukio Mishima, taken by Eikoh Hosoe, and, in 1971, the first commercially produced gay magazine in Asia. Since the 2000s, audiences outside Japan have used the term bara as an umbrella for Japanese and non-Japanese gay media about masculine men. The symbol is thought to trace back to Greek myth, including King Laius and his affairs with boys under rose trees. Greek poets such as Solon, Straton, Meleager, Rhianus and Philostratos also called handsome boys roses in their verse.

  On the other side of Europe, the city of Trieste had a rare white rose as its symbol, an association that artists made in the 19th century. The rose was believed to be extinct until 2021, when it was rediscovered in Trieste itself.

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