A Rose a Day No.35
This is a rare example of a rose featuring in a traditional Korean painting, and is a detail of a multi-panel screen. The themes of birds and flowers was a very common one in East Asian art. But roses almost never appear. This is a striking historical fact, because nearby China, which had a great influence on Korean culture, was home to a vast number of different species roses and had an advanced ‘culture of flowers’ from an early period,. But roses in China, Korea, and Japan were never given the same symbolic or aesthetic value they received in classical Persia, Greece and Rome, within Christianity and Islam, and later in secular modern culture.
This isn’t to suggest that the rose was of no cultural significance. The poet Bai Juyi (772 – 846 AD), seems to be the first in China to think of comparing the rose to a beautiful woman and writing it down. Paintings of roses occasionally feature within the popular ‘literati’ or scholar-painter genre of flower-and-bird painting, as in this Korean example, but when compared to the countless paintings of peonies, chrysanthemums, orchids, and bamboo in Chinese art – and indeed, in Japanese and Korean art and poetry - roses are exceedingly rare. We will return to this interesting cultural difference in future Chapters. Roses were also extensively cultivated for aesthetic and medicinal purposes. But they were not considered worthy enough to paint.
I think the rose in this painting is Rosa Chinensis spontanea, the wild form of the cultivated Rosa Chinensis.
In the 1880s, a Scotsman named Dr. Augustine Henry began hunting for species roses. Officially, Henry was employed by the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in China, but in his free time he dedicated himself to supplying Kew Gardens with tens of thousands of pressed specimens of various plants from China. Between late 1884 and early 1889, for example, Henry discovered 500 species that were new to Westerners, and 25 new genera. But as a typical Victorian, he seems to have had a soft spot for roses, writing to a friend: “I like plants with beautiful foliage and neat little flowers. I don’t care for colour much, I think chrysanthemums are positively ugly on account of their wretched leaves. The Roseis an exception: it is wonderfully beautiful in every way. As for Geraniums, I really can’t understand any one liking them.”
In 1883, Henry sailed up the Yangtze River and made an important discovery growing in a narrow ravine near the cave and temple of Three Pilgrims at the Ichang gorges in western Hubei province: the pure ancestor China rose, Rosa chinensis spontanea. This species rose is especially important from a botanical perspective because it is the parent of many of the China Roses which began to reach Europe by way of India from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Rosa chinensis spontanea is a climber with solitary flowers that sometimes are pink but more usually deep red, and Henry dutifully reported his find, and then eventually, in 1902, a drawing was published in the Gardener’s Chronicle. But Henry only reported his find, supported by the illustration, and the plant itself wasn’t formally collected until 1916by another notable amateur botanist and important collector for Kew Gardens and other institutions of the period, E.H. Wilson. In 1913, Wilson described the scene on one of his botanical forays up Yangtse river:
Rose bushes abound everywhere and in April perhaps afford the greatest show of any one kind of flower. R. laevigataand R. microcarpa are more common in fully exposed places. R. multiflora, R.moschata, and R. banksiae are particularly abundant on the cliffs and crags pf the glens and gorges, though by no means confined thereto. The Musk and Banksian Roses often scale tall trees and a tree thus festooned with their branches laden with flowers is a sight to be remembered. To walk through a glen in the early morning or after a slight shower, when the air is laden with the soft delicious perfume from myriads of rose flowers, is truly a walk through an earthy paradise.
But Wilson’s specimen was never seen in the West, and then, because of the crisis in China and the Communist victory in 1948, no foreign botanist got to actually set eyes on it again in order to corroborate its existence. But in the 1980s the political situation thawed enough for a Japanese botanist to find many Rosa chinensis spontanea flowering in southwest Sichuan province in 1983. He collected specimens, and made a full report. What he saw were large shrubs with arching and scrambling branches growing to up to eight meters tall. The flowers, however, had more petals than Henry’s specimen, and furthermore, they were pale pink when first open, but became darker red as they aged, a colour change that is almost unique amongst roses. But the botanist went on to discover that in other regions the species displayed somewhat different characteristics, and the flowers didn’t change colour.