Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  EARTHLY POWERS HAVE also laid claim to the rose, much as they did the heraldic lily; today, the rose is the national flower of Bulgaria, Ecuador, England, Finland (a white rose), Iraq, Romania (the Dog rose) and the United States. Eleanor of Provence, the wife of Henry III, is said to have introduced the rose into English royal heraldry; and a crowned red rose – in heraldry, the colour is ‘gules’ – was one of the many badges used by Henry IV and subsequent sovereigns. Among his emblems, Edward IV used the rose en soleil, and the white (‘argent’) rose inherited from his Mortimer rather than his York ancestors, while the Stuart sovereigns combined the English rose with the Scottish thistle.

  The rose’s most famous political incarnation is the Tudor rose, created as an inspired act of spin-doctoring by the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, at the end of the so-called Wars of the Roses, after his defeat of the Yorkist king Richard III and his own marriage to Richard’s niece, Elizabeth of York. To signify this union, Henry created his new emblem by setting the white rose of York inside the red rose of Lancaster, using the potent imagery of the rose to legitimize his tenuous claim to the throne. But the Wars of the Roses were no such thing – or, rather, the label was applied retrospectively by later historians who condensed a complex struggle enacted over more than thirty years into a simple conflict between two dynastic bloodlines that flowed only weakly through Henry Tudor’s veins. In any event neither side fought their battles under roses: Henry’s emblem was a red dragon and Richard’s a white boar. While the Lancastrians did indeed have a red rose as one of their emblems, dating back to Edmund Crouchback, the younger son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, the white rose is only indirectly a Yorkist emblem.

  Aided by Tudor propaganda, Henry’s invented rose became firmly associated with dynastic succession and the Tudors’ right to rule, replacing for a time the roses of courtly and Christian love. The particoloured Damask rose often known as the ‘York and Lancaster’ rose, Rosa × damascena ‘Versicolor’, appeared about this time; it may be John Gerard’s ‘blush rose’, which he classed among the Musks and described as being ‘of a white colour, dasht over with a light wash of carnation’, and it is certainly John Parkinson’s ‘Rosa versicolor, the party coloured Rose, of some Yorke and Lancaster’. The candy-striped Gallica Rosa Mundi emerged later, some time before 1640, when Nicolas Robert painted it for Gaston d’Orléans.

  Queen Elizabeth I displayed the Tudor rose in many of the portraits through which she adroitly manipulated her public image, among them the famous Pelican portrait of c.1574 by the court miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, in which a crowned Tudor rose and a crowned fleur-de-lis appear in the top corners, signifying her dynastic claims to England and France. The queen took another rose as her personal emblem, the Eglantine or Sweet briar, a rose of the hedgerows that also found its way into gardens. Gerard described the wild sort as having leaves that are ‘glittering, and of a beautifull greene colour, of smell most pleasant’, and whitish flowers ‘seldom tending to purple, of little or no smell at all’. The leaves of the garden sort were larger ‘and much sweeter: the floures likewise are greater, and somewhat doubled, exceeding sweet of smell’.

  Eglantine roses are traditionally associated with a charming miniature by Nicholas Hillard, Young Man among Roses, in which a gangly lovelorn youth leans against a tree, hand on heart, embowered in a thicket of scrambling white roses. The oval portrait is said to represent Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, thirty-three years younger than his sovereign and eventually executed for treason after the failure of his Irish campaign. He wears the queen’s colours, black for constancy, white for virginity; the dazzling whiteness of the flowers suggests that, rather than taking the Eglantine as his model, Hillier turned for inspiration to the musky Field rose, Rosa arvensis, the ‘sweet musk-roses’ of Titania’s bower in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Political roses did not stop with English monarchs. Today the red rose is the emblem of the French Parti Socialiste, a very masculine clenched fist holding a red rose adopted in late 1969, and of British New Labour, devised in the party’s rebranding begun by Neil Kinnock as leader and Peter Mandelson as director of communications. Nowhere is the political rose more prominent than in the United States, where the White House Rose Garden surrounding the Oval Office is a potent symbol of presidential power. It was here, in October 1986, that President Ronald Reagan declared the rose the national floral emblem of the United States of America in an emotional speech that wove roses into America’s prehistoric and revolutionary past, and its most cherished values. ‘More than any other flower,’ he declared, ‘we hold the rose dear as the symbol of life and love and devotion, of beauty and eternity. For the love of man and woman, for the love of mankind and God, for the love of country.’

  And if you want to discover a gardener’s political allegiance, look no further than the roses. When I visited the White House Rose Garden in 2008 during the Bush administration’s last summer, five of the Rose Garden’s ten rose varieties commemorated Republican presidents or their wives: ‘Pat Nixon’, ‘Barbara Bush’, ‘Ronald Reagan’, ‘Nancy Reagan’ and ‘Laura Bush’, while all the roses honouring Democrats had been uprooted, among them ‘Lady Bird Johnson’, ‘John F. Kennedy’ and ‘Rosalyn Carter’.

  THE ROSES CELEBRATED so far have been sources of private joy and of public celebration. But roses cast a darker shadow that links them to the deeper mysteries of life, and death. The expression ‘sub rosa’, under the rose, refers to conversations that are privileged and not to be divulged, and secret fraternities have periodically sought to harness the powers of the rose to their own ends.

  The link between roses and death was already present in the rites of ancient Greece, evident in the protective rose oil – ‘rose-sweet, ambrosial’ – with which the goddess Aphrodite anointed the body of the heroic Hector, slain by Achilles and dragged through the dust in revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus. The story is told in Homer’s Iliad, composed towards the end of the eighth century BCE. Wealthy Romans also took roses with them to the grave; in an extra ordinary feat of preservation, desiccated wreaths of Rosa × richardii – the ‘Rosa Sancta’ of Jo Shapcott’s poem – survived intact in Roman tombs at Hawara in Lower Egypt, excavated in the late 1880s by the British archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie. Some are now held by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, their roses darkened after nearly two thousand years to the colour of mummy flesh.

  17. Frederick Stuart Church’s enigmatic etching, Silence, c.1880.

  By an unnerving coincidence, the American painter Frederick Stuart Church put roses and mummies together in an etching of a mummified human head sniffing or kissing a (yellow) rose, executed a few years before Flinders Petrie’s discovery of the mummified roses and later reproduced as a watercolour and an oil painting. The French were particularly taken with the image, calling it ‘extremely strange but very personal’, and critics continue to speculate over its meaning. Drawn to ideas of reincarnation, and to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Odilon Redon, Church may have wanted to show the mummy imbibing life from the rose. Such transformative roses play a role in alchemy, the forerunner of chemistry, which originally pursued a material purpose – the transformation of base metals into gold – and only gradually acquired a more spiritual overlay that sought to transform the spirit into the gold of the awakened soul. In the alchemical process, the rose stands primarily as a symbol of conjunction, the ‘chymical wedding’ or mystical marriage of opposites between the active masculine principle (the Red King) and the receptive female principle (the White Queen). Here is a disturbing echo of the real-life marriage between ‘red’ Henry Tudor and ‘white’ Elizabeth of York, especially as the alchemical king and queen are often portrayed as roses, red for the male and white for the female.

  Increasingly drawn to spiritual and psychological interpretations of alchemy, the great twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung proposed the rose as
one of his transcendent symbols expressing psychological wholeness, along with the wheel and the mandala (from the Sanskrit word for circle), which the Jungian analyst Philippa Campbell explains as ‘a circle that contains all that is paradoxical and has at its centre the radiating rose. If we trace a mandala in our chaos we are offered a symbol that allows us to bring that which is unattended and forgotten into consciousness.’

  Long before Jung, the roses of alchemy had sported one of the Reformation’s strangest offshoots, which flourished in Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the elusive brother hood of the Rosicrucians, a society so secret that its very existence remained in doubt. The movement was linked to the rise of the Elector Palatine Frederick V, whose marriage to Princess Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James I of England, promised a new Protestant dawn. It was a short-lived dream that foundered after the Protestant Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia in defiance of the Catholic Habsburgs, taking Elizabeth to Prague where they reigned for just one winter, immortalized as the Winter King and Queen.

  Even before the wedding, two anonymous Rosicrucian manifestos had begun to circulate in Germany, followed by an alchemical romance, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz. All three texts centred on Christian Rosencreutz, the founder of an apparently revived brother hood offering its followers a return to the ‘truth, light, life and glory’ enjoyed by Adam in Paradise, and all three created a furore. Yet amid the uncertainty surrounding the ‘brotherhood’, the instigators of the Rosicrucian movement had struck metaphysical gold when they fused the two great symbols of Christianity, the cross and the rose, using the rose to soften the cross of Calvary. And while Frederick’s forces were crushed by the Habsburgs at the Battle of White Mountain, forcing Frederick and Elizabeth into permanent exile in The Hague, the Rosicrucian rose spread its suckering roots underground, ex citing controversy wherever it appeared – in the Netherlands and France initially, and much later in the turbulent, fin-de-siècle atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Europe, swirling with hermetic cults. Then the Irish poet and patriot William Butler Yeats fell under its spell, even joining a Rosicrucian group known as the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn. For Yeats, the rose was the western flower of life, equivalent in power to the eastern lotus; in her gilded cover design for Yeats’s The Secret Rose, published in 1897, Althea Gyles placed a four-petalled rose at the heart of a cross, within the twisting, serpent-like branches of a stylized Tree of Life.

  For other poets, this darker, secretive rose could equally contain the seeds of destruction. Into his ‘sick rose’ from Songs of Innocence and Experience, published a century before Yeats, William Blake crammed the ills of modern society: venereal disease, prostitution, exploitation, corruption, the tangled relations of humankind. And his ‘Pretty ROSE TREE’ in the same collection turned away from the poet in jealousy, her thorns his only delight. For decadent writers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, the rose was one of those ‘pretentious, conformist, stupid flowers . . . which belong exclusively in porcelain holders painted by young girls’. In the same vein, the surrealist Georges Bataille vented his spleen on the rose as an ideal of bourgeois feminine beauty, declaring that ‘even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their [centres] by hairy sexual organs. Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft.’

  And here, surely, is the point of the rose – not in Bataille’s description of a rose but in the fact that he could make of it what he willed. A ‘rose is a rose is a rose’, perhaps, as Gertrude Stein famously declared, but which rose is that? Umberto Eco alighted on the rose for the title of his medieval thriller, The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa), because, he said, it was ‘so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left’. Yet his sweeping dismissal ignores the very multiplicity that makes the rose so special. For it is precisely because the rose has so many meanings and so many manifestations that we can use it to tell our own stories, whether individually or collectively. President Ronald Reagan did just that when he gathered together a pot-pourri of rose facts and fictions for his declaration of the rose as the national flower of the United States of America. He was right in claiming that the discovery of rose fossils in Alaska proved that ‘the rose existed in America for age upon age’, but the rose that the first president, George Washington, is supposed to have named ‘Mary Washington’ after his mother belongs to the Noisettes, a class created after his death.

  One of the oddest rose ‘histories’ is that of the Cherokee rose (Rosa laevigata), adopted in 1916 as the state of Georgia’s floral emblem. One of only four supposedly ‘native’ roses included in the first Flora of America by Frenchman André Michaux, this rose was mythically linked to the forcible removal from their homeland of more than sixteen thousand Cherokee Indian people and their repatriation to Oklahoma. According to legend, the Cherokee mothers were grieving so much that they were unable to help their children, so the tribal elders prayed for a sign that would lift their spirits. The next day, wherever their tears had fallen sprang a beautiful rose: white for the mothers’ grief, gold-centred for the land that had been taken away from them, the seven leaflets on each stem representing the seven Cherokee tribes.

  Don’t believe a word of it. The stems of R. laevigata usually have three leaflets, not seven, and it is not even an American native. It comes from China, where it was illustrated by Chiu-Huang Pen Ts’ao in his Famine Herbal of the early fifteenth century; no one knows how it had reached America and naturalized across the southern states by the time of Michaux’s visit in the 1780s and 1790s.

  In the story of the rose, myths count almost as much as facts. ‘Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch’ (‘Rose, oh pure contradiction’): so begins the short epitaph Rilke wrote for his gravestone in the small mountain cemetery of the Burgkirche at Raron in Switzerland. Not even poets can hope to capture the essence of this most extraordinary flower.

  6

  Tulip

  Here is a story of human folly.

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT, ‘The Bitter Smell of Tulips’

  18. Tulips, drawn and engraved by Crispin de Passe the Younger, Hortus Floridus, 1614 (Courtesy of Dover Publications, Inc.)

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, my cousin sent me a packet of tulip bulbs from Amsterdam. They were gaudy Parrot tulips, their scarlet petals flamed with yellow and ruffled around the edges like primped silk. With some misgivings, I planted them by my front door and waited to be convinced. Their mid-spring flowers gladdened the heart and, despite my customary preference for plainer blacks and whites, I looked forward to their flowering the following year, having lifted and replanted them as the books say you should. But when they flowered a second time they reverted to plain reds on a yellow base, without the hint of a ruffle. Had I simply misremembered their flaring glory? Or had my prized tulips been spirited away by a covetous neighbour, like the black tulip in Alexandre Dumas’s famous tale?

  The story of the tulip is indeed one of hopes raised and dashed expectations. Surveying the landscaped wallpaper of Dutch tulip fields in early spring, or the massed ranks of tulips in Istanbul’s parks at tulip festival time, I find it hard to imagine the fortunes paid for a single bulb of this most coldly formal of flowers, or the ruin wrought by too covetous a love for it. The American cultural critic Michael Pollan called today’s tulips uniform and faithful, like paint chips. But my parrots were throwing something of their old selves into the ring: the ability to take us by surprise.

  Unlike virtually all the other flowers in this book, the tulip has no utility whatsoever. Its symbolic role in the folklore, poetry and faith of Iran and Turkey finds no match in Europe, where it commonly signifies either the transitory nature of life or the extent of human folly. Most tulips have little or no scent, and whatever power the tulip exerts comes from its beauty alone. Bulbs can be eaten, true, and sometimes were, usually when mistaken for onions, but the best that can be said o
f them is that they are not disgusting.

  So what is it about the tulip that has turned so many heads, most famously in the Netherlands but just as dramatically in Ottoman Turkey where its story truly begins? The inevitable crash of Dutch tulip fever in the 1630s was mirrored by Turkey’s resurgent tulip mania around a century later, when the country that first gave Europe its tulips went wild in its turn, and the passions it excited among the ruling caste cost the sultan his empire and the grand vizier his head. Yet the tulips favoured by Europeans and Ottoman Turks were utterly different creations, the flowers fat and flared in Europe versus thin and etiolated in Turkey. Beauty resides in the eye of the beholder, certainly, but beauty is a cultural construct as the tulip’s story so clearly demonstrates.