By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose. Published soon!

As I mentioned in a post a while ago, my new book is called By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose. It will published in October by Oneworld!

This is from the promotional blurb:

The rose is bursting with meaning: over the centuries it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death and the mystical unknown. Today the rose enjoys unrivalled popularity across the globe, ever present at life's seminal moments.

Grown in the Middle East two thousand years ago for its pleasing scent and medicinal properties, it has attached itself to us, its needy host and servant, to become one of the most adored flowers across cultures. The rose is well-versed at enchanting human hearts – no longer selected by nature, but by us. From Shakespeare's sonnets to Bulgaria's Rose Valley to the thriving rose trade in Africa and the Far East, via museums, high fashion, Victorian England and Belle Epoque France, we meet an astonishing array of species and hybrids of remarkably different provenance.

This is the story of a hardy, thorny flower and how, by beauty and charm, it came to seduce the worl

Take a look at my previous posts on roses, and in my posts over the next couple of months I will focus on the book and its subject, writing about some of the contents of the book, mostly my favourite stories about the rose.

For today, I would like to mention the endpapers, which are designed by my partner, Chang Eungbok. Here is a picture:

Eungbok used images from P.J. Redouté’s famous book Le Roses. Known as the “Raphael of flowers’, Redouté’s botanical paintings remain to this day unsurpassed. They combine botanically accuracy and high aesthetic value. Redouté was master draughtsman to the court of Marie-Antoinette before the French Revolution, and seems to have been of a harmlessly apolitical disposition, because he soon found himself similarly employed by Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, Empress Joséphine, whose love of roses, was largely responsible for launching the nineteenth century’s vogue for growing roses. After Napoleon’s defeat and the Restoration in 1815, Redouté found gainful employ again with the crème de la creme, which was now Marie-Amelie de Bourbon, the queen of King Louis-Philippe. Between 1817 and 1824, using mostly the roses in the gardens of Joséphine’s former Château at Malmaison as his models, Redouté embarked on Les Roses, which was eventually published in 30 fascicles of usually six plates, each with a commentary by the naturalist Claude-Antoine Thory. Regrettably, the originals were destroyed in a fire in the Library of the Louvre in 1837, but numerous printed first editions have survived.

Your an see lots of Chang Eungbok’s work on her website: www.monocollection.com