The Secret History of Roses

The rose is the “queen of flowers,” a potent symbol of devotion, desire and transcendent beauty that’s been cultivated for thousands of years. When Ronald Reagan declared the rose the “National Floral Emblem” of the United States in 1986, it joined England’s Tudor rose and Iran’s Damask rose, the deeply aromatic flower that’s used to make rose water, an integral part of Persian culture and cuisine.

Wild roses have been around for 35 million to 70 million years and are native to temperate regions across the northern hemisphere, where more than 200 species of rose flourish, explains Simon Morley, author of By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose. The earliest flower cultures emerged in China and the Middle East, where the first written evidence of rose cultivation dates to Sumer in Mesopotamia in 2200 B.C.

In China, rose breeders selected for unique traits of native species prized by Western growers, like the ability to bloom all summer long and the teacup shape now common in Valentine’s Day bouquets. Chinese roses moved west along the Silk Road and were crossed with European and American varieties.

“China has more native species of roses than anywhere else,” Morley says. “What we think of as a rose—as a Western, European thing—almost certainly has Chinese parents. The rose is a product of globalization from a very early period.”

Today, roses are primarily valued for their visual appeal, but in the ancient world, roses were all about their smell. From ancient Rome to the Persian Empire, the pungent scent of rose petals accompanied royal feasts, festival days and religious rites. Markets brimmed with rose water and rose oil, which was used as a perfume, breath freshener and herbal medicine. A recipe for rose oil perfume from the 1st century called for the petals of 7,000 fresh roses.

“The roses that became the most popular historically were the ones with the strongest scent, not necessarily the ones that looked nice,” says Morley, which explains the popularity of the deeply aromatic Damask rose. In Roman times, Persia was the epicenter of rose production with vast fields of Damask roses, which might have originated in Damascus, Syria. In the Islamic world, the Damask rose is the symbol of the Prophet Muhammad and its aroma is seen as both a blessing and a preview of paradise. Rose water made from the variety remains an integral part of Persian culture and cuisine.

Meanwhile, the classic red rose with its deep crimson color is a relatively modern creation, the result of crossbreeding Chinese and European varieties, says Morley. In nearly every language besides English, the word “rose” refers to both the plant and a specific color that’s much lighter than red.

“Shakespeare would probably never have seen a truly red rose,” Morley claims. “He might have said ‘red,’ but we would say ‘pink.’”

The ancient Romans borrowed their adoration of roses from the Greeks, along with the flower’s association with the goddess of love: Aphrodite in Greek mythology and Venus in the Roman pantheon. In addition to the Damask rose, the Romans prized the Gallica rose, one of the earliest roses cultivated in Europe. Even when its petals were dried and crushed into powder, the Gallica retained its fragrance, which the Romans used to scent rose oil and rose wine (rosatum) and to flavor desserts such as rose jellies and puddings.

During the height of the rose blossoming season in May and June, wealthy Romans would stage elaborate floral-themed banquets that ended with a cascade of rose blossoms falling from the ceiling. The 19th-century painting The Roses of Heliogabalus depicts an infamous event from around 220 B.C., when the depraved young Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (nicknamed Heliogabalus) allegedly killed some of his party guests under a suffocating pile of petals.

Nero, another figure of Roman “excess,” reportedly spent 4 million Roman sesterces on rose petals for a single banquet. While it’s nearly impossible to calculate the exact value of ancient Roman coins in modern currency, four million of anything was a lot of money.

In Roman mythology, Cupid—the son of Venus—gave a rose to the god Harpocrates in exchange for keeping quiet about Venus’ many love affairs. To the Greeks and Romans, Harpocrates was associated with silence, and there was an ancient custom of hanging a rose from the ceiling to indicate that a meeting or discussion was confidential. That custom gave rise to the term sub rosa, or “under the rose,” meaning that a conversation is to be kept private.

In addition to its association with spring and renewal, the ephemeral beauty of the rose blossom made it a potent symbol for life’s fleeting nature. The Roman funerary festival of Rosalia, also known as Rosaria, was held each May, when families laid garlands of roses on the graves of loved ones.

In Greco-Roman society, the rose was closely associated with Aphrodite/Venus, the goddess not only of love, but also of beauty, fertility, prosperity and, above all, sexual desire. The musky aroma of the rose figured heavily in Venus-inspired perfumes, incense, love potions and aphrodisiacs.

When Christianity became the state-sanctioned religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, a backlash emerged against the “sinful” sexuality of Venus and the hedonism of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and revelry. For a time, the rose fell out of favor due to its potent association with pagan rituals and erotic love.

But then Christian thinkers found a way to transfer the symbolism of the rose from Venus to the Virgin Mary. Ambrose of Milan, writing in the 4th century, taught that the rose had no thorns in the Garden of Eden. Only after Adam and Eve introduced sin into the world did the flower grow its painful reminders of that original transgression. Yet Mary, according to Ambrose, was the “rose without thorns”—a flower representing pure spiritual love and chaste beauty, free from the sexual associations of Venus.

“Thorns are one of the most interesting and poetic things about a rose, but when Christianity adopted the rose, they took the goddess of love and sanitized her by de-thorning the rose and turning it into this virginal thing,” Morley says. “And through the spread of Christianity, that’s how the rose carried on being so important in Western culture.”

By the 12th century, the rose had blossomed as a Christian symbol alongside growing devotion to the Virgin Mary. Medieval cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris were built with rose windows, breathtaking circles of stained glass that often featured images of the Madonna and Child. The Catholic rosary, a string of beads used to count and recite specific prayers, takes its name from the Latin rosarium, meaning a bouquet or garland of roses, and traces its origins to the 13th century.

Roses played a prominent symbolic role in 15th-century England, which was riven by a series of bloody civil wars between members of the House of Lancaster and the House of York vying for the crown. The heraldic emblem of the House of York was traditionally the Rosa alba or white rose, so the House of Lancaster chose the red rose as its symbol as a provocation.

Civil war broke out in 1455 when members of the House of York tried to overthrow King Henry VI, a Lancastrian. The two sides battled on and off for 30 years, a costly conflict that became known as the Wars of the Roses. The fighting finally ended at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, when King Richard III from the House of York was defeated by Henry Tudor, who had Lancastrian ancestry. Tudor was crowned King Henry VII and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the rival houses and bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end. Henry VII adopted a new royal emblem to symbolize a united England: the Tudor rose, a white rose layered within a red rose.

“The Tudor Rose is still the national rose of England, even though it’s an imaginary, symbolic rose,” Morley says.

During the Victorian era, outward expressions of affection were taboo, especially among the upper classes, but flowers provided a way for Victorian women to subtly show their true feelings through a fashionable visual language called floriography.

When Charlotte de La Tour published Le Langage Des Fleurs (“The Language of Flowers”) in 1819, it set off a floriography craze in Victorian England and the United States. De la Tour’s book cited the letters of an 18th-century Englishwoman named Mary Wortley Montagu, who claimed that floriography originated in Turkey, where members of the sultan’s harem used the hidden language of flowers to send coded messages.

“Floriography was the idea that every flower carried a specific symbolism and that by knowing the symbols, you could send a code to somebody that was less obvious and more subtle and knowing than saying it in words,” says Morley, adding that floriography is making a comeback.

In Victorian floriography, if a woman gave a lily to a man, it meant, “This is my loved one.” The poppy symbolized peace. Roses of various colors signified love in all its manifestations: red roses for passionate love, pink roses for admiration, yellow for joy and friendship, white for innocence and secrecy and dark crimson for mourning.