But the Romans took their love of roses too far, as they did so many of their pleasures, and roses came to signify luxuriousness and decadence, which helps to explain the long-standing prohibition against wearing rose chaplets in times of war. Rulers were criticized, too, for wallowing in an excess of roses to mask the stink of real life, or to soften the impact of passing through piles of soldiers’ corpses after a battle. Most notorious of all for his supposed addiction to roses was the Syrian boy emperor Elagabalus (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, c.203–22), better known as Heliogabalus, who is credited with suffocating his dinner guests in a cloud of rose petals. Although his first biographer wrote not of roses but of ‘violets and other flowers’, the power of the rose is such that it hijacked the misdeed, taking the starring role in the monumental Victorian painting The Roses of Heliogabalus by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the Dutch-born Academician whose grand vision would later inspire the films of Hollywood. Roses might help to plot the gradual spread of empires, but they could equally contribute to their downfall.
After the slow decline of the western Roman Empire, culminating in its defeat by Germanic tribes in the fifth century CE, roses slipped out of the limelight, cleansed only gradually of their pagan associations by the Christian Church and restored to health and favour in the infirmary gardens of Europe’s monasteries and religious orders. By Charlemagne’s time, three hundred years later, roses (in the plural) were listed among the seventy-three kitchen-garden plants and sixteen fruit and nut trees that were to be grown by royal decree on imperial estates, second only to the lily (in the singular), presumably the Madonna lily whose identification with the Virgin Mary gave it primacy.
Roses were also revered as the royal flowers of the Byzantines, and were nurtured by the great gardeners of the Moslem world, who borrowed from the conquered Persians their exquisite Paradise gardens, filling them with plants collected from foreign lands. A resident of Seville in Moorish Spain, the practical soil scientist Ibn al-‘Awwam wrote about many kinds of roses in his celebrated treatise on agriculture of the early twelfth century: the mountain rose, the red rose, the white rose, the yellow rose, the Chinese rose (ward al-sini), the wild Dog rose (nisrin), the sky-blue rose, and another that was blue on the outside and yellow on the inside. The list is intriguing: by ‘blue’, did he really mean ‘red’, as the late garden historian John Harvey has suggested? And might this ‘Chinese’ rose represent the first recorded sighting on European soil of Rosa chinensis, or was it a different plant altogether? Some eighty years later, the learned Dominican friar Albertus Magnus compiled a shorter list of the garden roses known in Christianized Europe. These included the white rose, a red rose, a field rose – possibly the sweet-smelling Rosa arvensis – and a stinking rose, colour unspecified but conceivably the yellow R. foetida from the Caucasus and the Middle East, although this rose is absent from all other medieval works written in Latin.
Christendom’s red and white roses climb the background trellis to two remarkable German paintings of the Madonna and child from the fifteenth century, Stefan Lochner’s ethereal Madonna in the Rose Bower, c.1450, and The Madonna of the Rose Bower painted by Martin Schongauer in 1473 as an altarpiece for Colmar’s church of St Martin. The latter is botanically the more interesting. It shows semi-double red roses with a clutch of golden stamens at their heart, almost certainly a garden variety of Rosa gallica, a native of central and southern Europe, its habitat stretching eastwards into Iraq; and a very double pinkish-white rose, surely a forerunner of R. alba, the progeny of R. gallica and an unknown Dog rose. Also prominent in the foreground is a thornless blood-red peony; in Germany they are known as ‘Pfingstrosen’, ‘roses of Pentecost’, commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ’s disciples after His ascension into heaven.
Almost certainly imported as precious rosewater before it came to Europe as a flower, the Damask rose was well established in European gardens by the sixteenth century, when it featured in early herbals. It may have originated in the caliphal gardens of the Muslim Empire or in Persia, which the French rosarian and scholar Charles Joret viewed as the cradle of the garden rose. Recent genetic investigation has found not two but three parents to the Damask, none of which coexists in the wild: Rosa gallica from Europe into south-western Asia; the scrambling, white-flowered R. fedtschenkoana from the foothills of the Celestial Mountains (Tien Shan) in Kyrgyzstan and eastwards into China; and the mysterious Musk rose, which inhabits a space somewhere in between. All three homelands are joined by the silk routes, the snaking, bifurcating routes that carried all manner of goods, people, ideas and religions to and from China’s western borders to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and onwards through Asia Minor into Europe. The carriers of the new roses westwards were the unsung heroes of plant diffusion – travelling scholars, monks, priests, immigrants, botanists scouting plants for the caliphs, merchants – rather than the warring crusaders who usually take credit in the West, without any supporting evidence.
16. A double yellow rose from the Levant, described by the great Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius in his posthumous Curae Posteriores (Leiden, 1611).
The fourth rose to join the triumvirate of Gallicas, Albas and Damasks in European gardens were the Centifolias, born of Dutch horticultural wizardry in the late 1500s, possibly from Middle Eastern stock. Dutch and Flemish botanists were certainly the first to sing the praises of this magnificent new rose, round as a small cabbage, its spiced-pinks scent judged by the Edwardian doyenne of gardens Gertrude Jekyll as ‘the sweetest of all its kind, as the type of the true Rose smell’. A splendid example of the garden rose’s perfectly timed reinvention to meet the needs and desires of the age, it became the rose of choice for Dutch and Flemish master flower painters of the seventeenth century, showy enough to stand alongside the flared tulips and other exotic blooms entering Europe from Constantinople and beyond. And just when the rose was beginning to lose ground to these other imports, the influx of roses from China sparked a frenzy of rose breeding and rosomanie, which saw the rose in all its manifestations restored to favour on both sides of the Atlantic.
Home to over half the world’s estimated 150 wild species of rose and to more endemic species than anywhere else, China almost certainly led the way in hybridizing the rose. Roses appeared in the imperial gardens near the ancient capital of Chang’an (modern Xi’an) in central China during the reign of the Han emperor, Wu Ti, more than two thousand years ago; and a millennium later, silk-screen paintings by the prominent Northern Song artist Cui Bai already displayed the high-centred buds of ‘modern’ rose cultivars. Yet despite such a profusion of roses, both wild and cultivated, the Chinese do not revere the rose to the same extent as western or Middle Eastern peoples, omitting it from the ‘Four Gentlemen of Flowers’ that represent the four seasons, for instance (see Chapter 7). And while early travellers to China reported fine roses for sale in Chinese nursery gardens, Chinese floriculture worshipped other stars, such as Moutan tree peonies, the sacred lotus, chrysanthemums, jasmine and camellias.
The China roses that took Europe by storm from the late eighteenth century onwards brought qualities that were startlingly new. These were the lightest of silks compared with the crumpled damasks of old Europe, in radiant colours that included clear reds, scarlets and yellows; their leaves, too, were a lustrous green and their buds elegantly pointed. While many lacked fragrance, a few carried the fresh and delicate hint of tea, or the ‘faint sweet smell’ of a harebell. Best of all, in contrast to most European roses, Chinese roses were repeat-flowering and bloomed long into autumn in an apparently everlasting display.
The advent of China roses resulted in a veritable mania of rose-breeding, led by the French among the coterie of amateur and professional rose-growers living in and around Paris during the First Empire, who projected their passions onto the Empress Josephine, considerably over-inflating her reputation as France’s most iconic rose lover. Rose frenzy quickly spread to the British, Dutch, Germans and Americans, produ
cing a bewildering medley of new cultivars and whole new classes of rose: Noisettes, Bourbons, Tea roses, Hybrid Chinas, Hybrid Perpetuals and – in 1867, with Rosa ‘La France’ bred by Guillotfils of Lyons – the ever-popular Hybrid Teas, which mark the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ classes of rose. Rose parties became all the rage, in America and Britain, and by the 1880s the rose had replaced the camellia in privileged circles as queen of the cut flowers. At a midwinter party in New York, the Vanderbilts dazzled their 1,000 guests with 50,000 cut roses of the very best varieties, among them the velvety, long-stemmed R. ‘Général Jacqueminot’, which retailed at the exorbitant price of $1 a stem. But roses were popular among all classes of society, whether they lived in a cottage or a castle; and according to Dean Samuel Reynolds Hole, the proselytizing first President of Britain’s National Rose Society, some of the best new roses were grown and exhibited by working men.
The trend among modern rose breeders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has favoured free-flowering roses that are resistant to disease, require minimal maintenance (America’s KnockOut® Roses are even described as ‘self-cleaning’, like ovens) and, in certain breeding programmes, able to withstand climatic extremes – down-to-earth aims that nonetheless help to explain the rose’s enduring popularity. Some growers explicitly include aesthetic factors in their breeding programmes. Britain’s David Austin, for instance, looks for well-formed flowers, fine fragrance, attractive growth, good health and disease resistance, general sturdiness and that elusive quality – charm.
BEAUTY IS NOT the only source of the rose’s appeal, however, or of its power. In pre-classical Greece the rose enjoyed an economic value as an ingredient in perfumes, and it has played a significant role in the materia medica of both West and East. Roses in perfumery have the longer pedigree, known to us from a storekeeper’s clay tablet preserved by chance after a catastrophic fire destroyed the palace of Pylos in the south-western Peloponnese towards the end of the thirteenth century BCE. The tablet lists two sorts of scented oils – rose and sage – and an astringent herb, cyperus, added at an earlier stage to make the oil receptive to their fragrance. The oils were used in perfumed unguents to keep fabrics shiny and supple, and as grave goods for the dead. The Greeks, too, made a perfumed rose oil using fresh roses, spices, sesame oil, salt and red colouring from alkanet. Worn chiefly by men, it was also added to other perfumes to lighten their scent and was a special favourite of Theophrastus, who found its fragrance energizing. Pliny the Elder liked it too, omitting the rose from his condemnation of more extravagant perfumes.
Although Aristotle understood the principles of distillation, the ancient world made its perfumes by macerating flowers and spices with oils and fats, never by distilling them with water and steam. The art of distillation was perfected in the empire of the Arabs, its application to perfumery often attributed to the great eleventh-century Persian physician and polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna), but it was already in use more than a century earlier, described by another Persian physician, the philosopher and alchemist al-Razi, known to the Latins as Rhazes. Long celebrated as the country of roses, Persia had developed a perfume industry from the beginning of the ninth century at least, much of it centred around the southern city of Shiraz. As the German traveller and physician Engelbert Kaempfer recorded after visiting the region in the 1680s, ‘Even as the roses in Persia are produced in greater abundance and with finer perfume than those in any other country in the world, so also do those of this particular district in the vicinity of Shiraz, excel in profusion and in fragrance those of any other locality in Persia.’
The distillation of rosewater also produces a more concentrated oil that appears as droplets floating on the surface, which can be extracted by a process of double-distillation to produce ‘attar’ or ‘otto’ of roses. Legend credits its discovery to the marriage feast in 1612 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir to the ambitious and supremely beautiful Princess Nur Jahan, when the princess filled an entire canal with rosewater. As the pair rowed or walked by the water, they noticed an oily scum floating on its surface, which released the most delicate perfume known to the East. In fact, the technique for separating rose oil from rosewater was already understood, probably developed independently in Europe, the Arab world and India, and its description by the Italian Geronimo Rossi of Ravenna pre-dates the marriage feast by several decades. But the story illustrates the potency of this most romantic of perfumes. The much fêted rose otto came to Europe from Turkey and more particularly from around Kazanlik in modern Bulgaria, using Damask roses that still bear the town’s name; Turkey and Bulgaria continue to vie for supremacy in the quantity and quality of their production. The perfume industries of Morocco and France more commonly use Centifolia roses, from which they extract ‘rose absolute’ with solvents or carbon dioxide at high pressure.
While the scent of roses still infuses many modern perfumes, its popularity has waxed and waned as tastes swing between the floral and the feral, especially musk and civet with their undertones of excrement and sex. Despite her supposed love of roses, the Empress Josephine relished more obviously sensual scents; sixty years after her death, the smell of musk was said to linger still in her boudoir at Malmaison. After Josephine, lighter, fresher floral scents came back into fashion; in a mid-nineteenth-century work permeated with roses, the French perfumer Eugene Rimmel advised women to use ‘simple extracts of flowers, which can never hurt you, in preference to compounds, which generally contain musk and other ingredients likely to affect the head’.
Roses were useful, too, in the simple business of keeping clean. Washing as an aid to cleanliness is a relatively recent invention; Europeans of the sixteenth century used friction and perfume to mask unpleasant odours. ‘To cure the goat-like stench of armpits,’ wrote the French author of a self-help guide of 1572, ‘it is useful to press and rub the skin with a compound of roses.’
THE HEALING ROSE is just as potent as the perfumed rose, even if it lacks the medical history of the opium poppy. As with so much of western and Middle Eastern medicine, Pedanius Dioscorides provides the basic text in his great De Materia Medica of the first century, in which he distinguished between common Dog roses, not much used in Greek medicine, and cultivated roses, good for sore eyes, ears and gums; aches and pains of various descriptions; wounds and sundry inflammations; diarrhoea; spitting blood; and cosmetics. According to the Greek theory of humours, roses were hot and wet, and their effect generally cooling and astringent, ‘but of an airish [humour] sweet and spicy’, added the English divine and herbalist William Turner, quoting the Assyrian physician Mesuë, ‘and fiery and fine, of which cometh the bitterness, the redness, the perfection, and the form or beauty’. Each remedy required a different preparation, and Dioscorides also explained how to make rose oil, rose wine and deodorant rose pomanders, which women could wear like a necklace.
The rose most used in western and Arab medicine was the Apothecary’s rose, Rosa gallica var. officinialis, claimed by the French apothecary Christophe Opoix of Provins to have been brought back from the Holy Land by the crusading Thibaut IV, king of Navarre and count of Champagne, although the parent species is a European native and Opoix’s story is more likely a product of civic pride. Bushy but low-growing, the Apothecary’s rose bears large semi-double flowers with characteristic golden stamens, known as ‘threads’ in Tudor times, and is highly scented. In England, it enjoyed its greatest popularity at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, when it was considered a ‘cure-all’ for more than fifty ailments in The Garden of Health by Turner’s near-contemporary, William Langham, recommended for everything from general aches, backaches, belly griefs, bladder griefs, bloody flux, weak brains and sore breasts to vomiting, tongue ulcers, stopped urine, white discharges, windiness, worms and wounds. The pharmacologies of other nations naturally relied on their own native roses, such as the dried hips of Rosa laevigata used to cure premature ejaculation in Chinese medicine, and the astringent wild roses reported by early North Americ
an settlers as native remedies for burns and scalds.
Enamoured of his many varieties of garden rose, the herbalist and barber-surgeon John Gerard paints a delightful picture of the rose in Elizabethan sickrooms, its use proposed as a gentle remedy for purging stomachs of ‘raw, flegmaticke, and now & then cholerick’ excrements – Musk and Damask roses were especially suited – and, taken as distilled rosewater, to strengthen the heart, refresh the spirits, and for any ailment that required gentle cooling. As in Arab medicine, rosewater was particularly recommended for sore eyes, as it ‘mitigateth the paine of the eies proceeding of a hot cause, bringeth sleepe, which also the fresh Roses themselves provoke through their sweete and pleasant smell’. With the rose, utility and beauty are closely linked, and Gerard’s recovering patients would surely have delighted in his suggestions for adding rosewater to ‘junketting dishes, cakes, sawces, and many other pleasant things’, and for a morning feast of Musk rose petals eaten ‘in maner of a sallade, with oile, vineger & pepper, or any other way according to the appetite & pleasure of them that shall eate it’. As well as providing pleasure, the aim was to purge the belly of ‘waterish and cholericke humours’, producing six to eight stools for every twelve to fourteen Musk flowers.
Red, white and Damask roses retained their role in English medicine throughout much of the seventeenth century, classed by London doctors among the five cordial flowers, along with violets, borage, rosemary and balm, and available medicinally in a number of different forms: as vinegars, decoctions, juleps, syrups, electuaries, lohochs, powders, pills, sugars, troches, oils and ointments, their recipes carefully laid down in the physicians’ bible, the Pharmacopoea Londinensis. One of their most ardent supporters was the radicalized plantsman and medical rebel, Nicholas Culpeper, who took the Parliamentarians’ side in the Civil War and died at the age of thirty-seven from a combination of wounds, consumption and furious smoking. An adherent of astrological gardening, Culpeper added French pox and leprosy itch to William Langham’s list of ailments cured or calmed by the rose, maintaining that different roses operated under different planets: red roses under Jupiter, Damask roses under Venus, white roses under the moon and Province (Centifolia) roses under the king of France.
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