A Rose a Day No.30

This is a detail of Paolo Uccello’s masterpiece, ‘The Battle of San Romano’ (1438-40) in the National Gallery. London. A long time ago I used to do guided tours for the NG, and often talked about this huge painting. But I never noticed the roses. Can you see them? Behind the knights there’s a thick hedge of Gallica Roses (the pink ones) and Alba Roses (the white).

This is the whole paintings:

The Gallica rose was the most familiar rose in this period.

It had been around in Western Europe since the Romans. Rosa gallica officinalis, had several aliases merely in the English language: Apothecary Rose (officialis means apothecary, which indicates it was cultivated for medicinal purposes), ‘Gallic Rose’, ‘French Rose’, or ‘Rose of Provins’, are other names that indicate the close association with France, and in particular with the town of Provins, where they were cultivated as a cash-crop.

In Roses for English Gardens (1902), the  gardening expert Gertrude Jekyll, the most important advocate of the rose to the late Victorians and Edwardians, says this  about the Gallica Rose:

Of the old Provins Roses (R. gallica) there are a number of catalogued varieties. They are mostly striped or splashed with rosy and purplish colour. I have grown them nearly all, but though certainly pretty things, they are of less value in the garden than the striped Damask Rosa Mundi. But there is an old garden Rose, the Blush gallica, much more double, and that grows into very strong bushes, that is a good Rose for all gardens. It will put up with any treatment. I have it on the top of a dry wall where it tumbles over in the prettiest way and blooms even more freely than the bushes on the level

There are two other paintings by Uccello of the same battle, now in the Uffizi and the Louvre. They do not include any roses: