A Rose a Day No.48

This seventeenth century etching is of a Rosa centifolia (hundred petalled rose) aka the Cabbage Rose, Holland Rose, Provence Rose, Rose de Mai, or Grasse Rose. It has shrubby with long drooping canes, and before the nineteenth century it was unique in having round, globular flowers comprised of numerous densely-overlapping petals, hence the name – it resembles a cabbage. These petals are usually pink, but sometimes white or dark purplish-red. As Rosa gallica, Rosa moschata, Rosa canina, and Rosa damascena were all participants in parenting the Rosa centifolia, it can claim to be the most truly communally European rose, although conception occurred somewhere in the Near East.

It used to be assumed the Cabbage Rose was quite ancient and was known to the Romans. The English nurseryman and author Thomas Rivers, for example, in The Rose Amateur’s Guide (1837), writes: “This rose has long and deservedly been the favourite ornament of English gardens; and if, as seems very probable, it was the hundred-leaved rose of Pliny, and the favourite flower of the Romans, contributed in no small degree to the luxurious enjoyments of that great people, it claims attention as much for its high antiquity, as for its intrinsic beauty. 1596 is given by botanists as the date of its instruction to our gardens.”

But it seems Rivers was mistaken. The consensus is that Dutch traders introduced the Centifolia to Western Europe in the sixteenth century from Persia. Long before it became a favourite in Europe, gul-i sad barg (hundred-petaled rose), was already a much-prized species in the Islamic world, and had important economic and cultural significance, as its sweet, and honey-noted fragrance made it highly valued in the production of rose-water. One of its names in Western Europe, Provence Rose, is an indication that this region of southern France became an important one for the rose’s cultivation for the perfume business.