French Roses and Oak Trees
Some Rose News
It’s been a while since I wrote my blog, the reason being that I’ve been in my house in central France over the summer. It’s the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two-and-a-half years! Although others have been staying there, and keeping an eye on the garden, several of the roses I planted just before I left the last time (in February 2020) didn’t make it, alas. And July-August isn’t the best time to enjoy the rose-garden. But several roses were in bloom. Here’s one: Reine des Violettes , a wonderfully fragrant magenta coloured Hybrid Perpetual, cultivated in France and in commerce since 1860.
In my book By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose I write that Hybrid Perpetuals “were crosses with Portland, Chinas, and Bourbon Roses, and are upright plants about six feet tall, quite fragrant, and mostly pink or red. Between 1850 and 1900 they were considered the characteristically new or modern roses. As the name suggests, Hybrid Perpetuals inherited the remontancy characteristic from being crossed with a Chinese parent. This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers. But the Hybrid Perpetuals would soon be overshadowed by the Hybrid Teas, which possess the general habit of the Hybrid Perpetuals but have the more elegantly shaped buds and free-flowering character of their parent, the Chinese Tea Rose.“
Concerning my book about roses, I’m pleased to say that it is now available in Italian. Here’s the back and front cover:
A New Project?
I’ve been thinking about the oak tree because just down the road from my house in France straddles the immense Forest of Tronçais, which at 26,000 acres is one of the largest stands of sessile oak (Quercus petraea) in western Europe. Amongst other things, the Forest is celebrated for supplying oak wood for wine and brandy barrels; almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais. In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris.
It is not too much to say that human civilization is both literally and metaphorically built on oak trees like those in the Forest of Tronçais. For millennia, oak lumber was the premier building material for houses, boats, and furniture. The oldest surviving Viking longboat is made of oak. Oak wood also served as fuel in the form of logs, and later, as charcoal. The acorn was an abundant and nutritious food. The bark was used in the production of leather. It was also valued medicinally as an antiseptic and hemostatic, a pacifying agent in inflammation, a healing agent for burns, and a cure toothache and gastropathies. Many important manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells and the American Declaration of Independence, were written in ink made of oak gall, produced by wasp larvae who live on the oak tree. The oak is central to many myths and religions, especially of Europe. The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and Teutonic tribes all venerated the oak tree above all other trees. The ‘Golden Bough’ that serves as the title to James Frazer’s celebrated foundational text on world mythologies was sheltered within a sanctuary of sacred oak trees. In Celtic mythology, the oak symbolized the virtues of strength, courage, and wisdom, and the word ‘Druid’ may derive from the Celtic meaning “knower of the oak tree.” Contemporary witches suggest hanging a sprig of oak in the house to ward off negativity, strengthen family unity, afford protection, and promote prosperity.
At the western edge of the forest stands a very old oak named La Sentinelle. Born around 1580, during the Wars of Religion then raging in the region (and that led to the sacking of my village, and the destruction of its walled château) La Sentinelle means ‘The Sentry’ or ‘The Watchman’ . It’s my favorite of the ancient oaks in the forest, and I always make a point of visiting it and giving it a hug. Here it is as of early July, 2022:
As you can see, La Sentinelle certainly looks its age. Deeply fissured, gnarled, and cracked, and not very elegant looking, it would take four people with arms outstretched to gird its stocky, nobly, trunk. It puts me in mind of a story of the Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu, or Zhuangzi, (369—298 B.C.E). Here it is as translated by Solala Towler in Chuang Tzu – The Inner Chapters, the Classic Taoist Text (2010):
Once a master carpenter named Shih was travelling with his apprentice on his way to the state of Chi. When they arrived in Chu Yuan village they passed a huge old oak tree sheltering the village shrine. It was huge, large enough to fit several thousand oxen under its branches. It was 100 spans and towered over everything else in the village with its lowest branches a full 80 feet in the air. These branches were so large they could have been made into a dozen boats. Many people were standing under it, their necks craned as they tried to see the top. But the master carpenter did not even turn his head as they passed it; but walked on without stopping for a moment.
His apprentice took one look at the immense tree and ran after his master saying: “Since I first took up the axe to train with you Master, I have never seen a tree as magnificent. Yet you do not even look at it, much less stop. Why is this?”
The carpenter said, “Enough! Not another word about this tree! Its wood is useless. A boat made from its timber would sink; a coffin would rot before you could put it into the ground; any tool you made from it would snap. It has too much sap in it to make a door, and a beam made from its wood would be full of termites. Altogether it is a completely useless tree and that is why it has lived so long.”
One night, after he returned home, the ancient tree came to the carpenter in a dream and spoke to him. “What are you comparing me too,” it asked, “useful trees like cherry, apple, pear, orange, citron and all the other useful trees? Yet for these trees, as soon as the fruit is ripe they are stripped; their branches are broken and torn off. It is their usefulness that causes them so much abuse. Instead of living out the years heaven has given them they are cut off halfway through. So it is for living things. This is why I have worked so long to cultivate the spirit of uselessness. I was almost cut down several times but I have been able to attain a great level of uselessness and this has been very useful to me. If I had been more useful I would never have attained the great age that I have, and grown so large.
“The two of us are similar. We are both just beings in the world. How is it that we go about judging other beings? You, an old and worthless man, about to die, how can you judge me and call me worthless?”
Shih the carpenter awoke then and spent a long time lying in his bed trying to understand this strange dream. Later, when he shared his dream with his apprentice the young man said, “If this ancient tree is so interested in being useless why has it allowed itself to become part of the village shrine?”
His master said, “It is only pretending to be a shrine. It is its way of protecting itself. Even though its timber is useless, if it were not a shrine it would have been cut down long ago. It is totally different from other trees. You cannot hope to understand it!”
La Sentinelle is on last legs, its death accelerated by climate change. Since I last visited, it had lost several of its huge branches..
I realize my life has been intertwined with the oak from almost the beginning. The house I grew up in had a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) – the most common kind of oak in England - growing in the garden. It was much taller and much older than the house and completely dominated the garden. In the summertime, all I could see out my bedroom window were its leaves and branches, which almost but not quite reached close enough for me to leap out the window into its canopy, like the young aristocrat in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), who rebels against his dull family by climbing into an oak tree in the garden and then refuses to come down - ever. Today, in South Korea, the hills around my house are mostly covered in young oak trees. The majority are Quercus dentata, which is smaller in size than the typical European oaks, but has the largest leaves of any – some are bigger than my open hand.
in the not to distant future my burgeoning interest in the oak tree will bear fruit as a new book. And in my next post I’ll be over my jet lag and ruminating once again on things Korean…..Well, Probably.
A Valentine’s Day Post about Roses
Image courtesy of: https://infinityrose.com/valentines-day/
As it’s Valentine’s Day today, here is a short adapted extract from my book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’, recently published by Oneworld:
“I began writing this Chapter just before Valentine’s Day which in the United States was worth $20.7 billion in 2019. The average American spent $161.96 on gifts, meals, and entertainment, and men spent twice as much as women. In 2018, according to the Society of American Florists, an estimated 250 million roses were produced for the special day in the USA alone. But people also gave and received huge quantities of products with red roses emblazoned on them – cards, chocolates, lingerie. In 2009 it was estimated that in the United States, the 100 million roses given on Valentine’s Day generate about 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide on the journey from field to florist. In 2019 the level for the UK was 5.65 cubic tones. To put this in proportion, the average American has a carbon footprint of about 15 metric tons a year, which is the highest in the world. (And the carbon footprint of the cut-rose trade will continue to increase, because the Internet has made ordering on-line so effortless, while simultaneously widening the chasm between our commendable intentions and any sense of the real-world consequences of our actions, which have also been highjacked by social media in cahoots with commercial interests. All this means that rather than taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and giving out oxygen, like normal plants, cut-roses are actually adding to the disastrous toxic payload.
That’s quite a legacy for an anniversary that seems to have been invented by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century. His The Parliament of Fowls includes a love debate among birds who choose their mates on ‘Saint Valentine’s Day’, and this is the first known mention of the annual festival of love. He seems to have consciously fabricated the festival, introducing it to the English court as a special courtly-love anniversary, loosely derived from Catholic tradition. The historical precedents include the fact that in the fifth century, Pope Gelasius made February 14th St. Valentine’s Day, after a martyred bishop, Saint Valentine of Terni. There is some documentary evidence supporting a link between this saint and ideas of fertility, but it isn’t substantial enough to warrant the forging of a concrete alliance that makes Valentine’s Day the day of lovers. But thanks to Chaucer, by the middle of the 18th century friends and lovers were exchanging small tokens of affection or handwritten notes on February 14th.
The arrival of printing technology capable of mass-producing greeting cards, the emergence of the advertising industry, and cheaper postage rates, encouraged the channeling of expressions of amorous affection towards this one particular anniversary. Roses were already traditionally associated with love, a fact reflected in the nineteenth century vogue for floriography – the ‘language of flowers’ – where different flowers stood for different emotions. The red rose was associated with deep love, becoming the flower of choice to signal one’s love for someone. So in this way, the grounds for the co-opting of the rose for an anniversary celebrating love became more or less inevitable, despite the fact, of course, that February is not a month known for its rose blossom.”
The typical cut-rose we give on Valentine’s Day is ‘high-centered.’ The ensemble of petals divide into four equal parts, and the petals at the centre stand above the outer opened petals. This is the form of the Hybrid Tea roses bred for the cut-rose business.
These are also the kind favoured by the dastardly President Coriolanus Snow in ‘The Hunger Games’ movies. Snow wears a white one in his lapel buttonhole at all times. In the final episode, ‘‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part II’ (2014) the heroine Katniss Everdeen visits the now defeated Snow in the winter garden of his mansion and sees beds of white roses growing. Snow wears the rose, we are told, to hide the stench of the rotting ulcers in his mouth caused by imbibing the poison he is obliged to drink small doses of while toasting the unexpecting rivals and enemies he dispatches by putting poison in their drinks.
President Snow in ‘The Hunger Games. Mockingjay’ (2014)
Image courtesy of: https://thehungergames.fandom.com/wiki/Coriolanus_Snow
The choice of the rose was a masterstroke in ‘The Hunger Games’, as it perfectly symbolizes the nature of the regime of Panem, whose name derives from the Latin phrase Panem et circenses - 'bread and circuses'. In other words, the rose plays a role in making coercive power seem pleasing, not just by being beautiful but by concealing the truth. I wouldn’t want to say that Valentine’s Day plays a similar role within our neoliberal capitalist order. Not quite…..
In my book, I don’t mention ‘The Hunger games’, as I hadn’t remembered the roses, but watching ‘Mockingjay’ recently on Netflix reminded me. But I did note the comments of the celebrated graphic designer Pete Saville, who borrowed a reproduction of a Henri Fantin-Latour’s still life painting for the cover of the electronica band New Order’s album Power, Corruption and Lies (1983). Saville commented: “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives.” , it is almost certain that the roses used in the movie are completely without scent, like pretty much all of the cut-roses sent at Valentine’s Day.
A Rose a Day No.50
Today in my 50th and final post on roses.
Ever since I first saw this photograph by Edward Steichen, it’s haunted me. It’s entitled ‘Heavy Roses, Voulangis, France’ and was taken in 1914. Talk about funereal!
This from a Christie’s auction catalogue (October, 2018):
Edward Steichen’s Heavy Roses, Voulangis was taken in 1914, shortly before the break of World War I, and is believed to be the last photograph Steichen would take in France before fleeing the German invasion. At the time, Steichen, whose early artistic aspirations veered toward painting, was still employing a Pictorialist sensibility in his photographic practice. By that year, Steichen had taken some of his most celebrated images, among them, In Memoriam, 1901; Rodin, Le Penseur, Paris, 1902 and The pond – Moonlight, 1904, all depicting classical subjects—from noble portraits to sweeping landscapes—in a variety of sumptuous printing techniques—from gum bichromate to platinum.
Likewise, Heavy Roses, Voulangis depicts a closely cropped arrangement of overlapping plump roses in varying degrees of bloom and decay. The flowers in the photograph appear to be actual size, heightening their near-tactile quality and relatability, subsequently appearing as an extension of the viewers’ immediate reality. At the time of this image, Europe was at the brink of war, and the flowers, it has been suggested, were emblematic of the pending disaster and the loss in livelihood; an homage to passing beauty. Of the poignant, powerful ability of photographs for storytelling, Steichen would later write, 'I am no longer concerned with photography as an art form. I believe it is potentially the best medium for explaining man to himself and to his fellow man.'
The roses seem to be picture of Centifolia - the ‘Provence Rose’.
Image and text: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/edward-steichen-heavy-roses-voulangis-france-4
A Rose a Day No.49
In his religious works Sandro Botticelli painted roses associated with the Virgin Mary, but in this, his most famous painting, ‘The Birth of Venus’ (mid 1480s), the roses have a wholly different symbolic meaning. They are bound on the level of the symbol to the pagan subject through an accumulation of visual references from literary sources derived from Homer and Ovid.
Many Classical myths refer specifically to the rose in relation to Venus, or Aphrodite as she was known to the Greeks. At her birth, she causes the sea-foam to become white roses as it fell onto dry land. The rose becomes red through the spilling of Aphrodite’s blood. While running to Adonis, her lover, Aphrodite scratches herself on the thorns of a rose bush and turns the white roses to red. In another myth, Adonis is mortally wounded by a wild boar while out hunting, and from the mixture of his blood and her tears there grows the first blood-red rose. But in another myth the transformation is caused by the blood of Aphrodite’s son, Eros (the Roman Cupid or Amor), the god of love, youth, vitality, and fruitfulness. The thorns on the rose were also added by Eros, who, while kissing the most beloved of his as yet thornless roses, is stung by a nectar-gathering bee concealed inside the flower (the bee is another symbol of Aphrodite). His mother gives Eros a magical quill of arrows so he can take revenge, and Eros shoots at the bees on the rose bushes, and the thorns appeared where he missed his mark.
Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, but she was never faithful to him, and had numerous affairs, including with the god of war, Ares (Mars to the Romans). In one myth, Aphrodite names a flower created by Chloris (Flora to the Romans) and dedicates it to Eros, who then offers the rose as a bribe to Harpocrates (the god of silence), hoping to keep secret his mother’s perpetual sexual indiscretions. As a result, the Latin term sub rosa, ‘under the rose’, links the rose to silence, secrecy, and the unknowable. As this and many other myths suggest, Aphrodite may personify sexual pleasure and love, but her unpredictability led sometimes to wanton lust and violence. In fact, she was also a warrior goddess, and sometimes went by the name the ‘Black One’, ‘Dark One’, and ‘Killer of Men’. Such was her power that acts of honouring her brought reward, but disrespect or disregard meant brutal punishment.
Several flowers and fruit, such as the red anemone, myrtle, apple, and pomegranate, were sacred to Aphrodite/Venus, as were birds like the dove, sparrow, swan, goose and duck, and shellfish. The importance of water-fowl indicate that Aphrodite was the daughter of Poseidon, and that ‘Aphrodite’ means ‘born from the sea’, that is, from the womb of the Great Mother Goddess. But the rose would become especially sacred to the goddess of love. The Odes of Anacreon, which contain the earliest poetic reference to the rose, refer directly to the goddess of love and her intimate relationship to this special flower: ‘The gods beheld this brilliant birth [of Aphrodite], / And hail'd the Rose, the boon of earth!’, writes Anacreon.
Botticelli depicts her floating to land on a conch shell being blown by Zephyr, the west wind, and Chloris, the goddess of flowers, towards a Horai, goddess of spring, who is about to dress Venus in a flowered mantle. The painting includes a lovely shower of Damask Roses. Here are some details of the roses:
The special relationship of the rose to the sacred empyrean was also encoded on a linguistic level. The Greek word rhódon is connected phonetically with rheein, meaning ‘to flow’, linking the rose’s life-cycle and scent to endless effluvious life, and thereby making it closely associated with the metamorphosis that is characteristic of humanity’s relationship to nature. In Latin, rosa sounds like ros – ‘dew’ – which is an especially ethereal natural phenomenon also closely associated with the realm of the gods. The words rhodon and rosa are the colour of light itself, and so the plant was deemed to originate in the world of the gods. In relation to sexual love, the word rosa sounds very close to the Greek eros, the name of Aphrodite’s son which was also used by the Romans, and this provided a linguistic basis for the association. These interconnections, reinforced by a purely visceral delight in the visual and olfactory beauty of the rose, meant the rose was understood to be both an earthly creation and a material sign of the world of the immortals.
But the rose’s relationship to the goddess of love was also cemented on a sensory level which is directly related to more general social practices of the period. The rose was deemed to be an earthly thing both beautiful and valuable, but it was also pleasing to the gods, who were imagined, described, and depicted wearing floral garlands and dresses, and emanating intoxicating scents from anointed oils. In a poem fragment, the poet Sappho summons Aphrodite to her temple on the island of Crete, and describes the setting in a sacred grove of apple trees, blooming with rose and spring flowers, where the altars are smoky with sweet-smelling fragrance of roses. At the end of the Illiad, Aphrodite is described as using immortal rose oil to protect the body of Hector from savage dogs. She ‘anointed him with ambrosial oil of roses that his flesh might not be torn.’ The first recorded reference to a rose, on a tablet excavated in Pylos on the Peloponnesian peninsula, probably from the 13th century BC, mentions aromatized oils that included rose extract. Rose oil was used by priests and priestesses during sacred rites to generate a heady atmosphere of conducive to communion with the Olympians, but also by lovers, who anointed themselves when they met for trysts, but The female poet Nossis, writing in the third century BC, declared: ‘There is nothing sweeter than love: all other blessings / Take second place. I even spit honey from my mouth. / This is what Nossis says./ Whomever Kypris has not kissed, / Does not understand her flowers, what kinds of things roses are!’.
The symbolic connection of the rose with goddess of sexual love was also tangible in other ways. A rose flower is literally the plant’s sex organ – a hermaphroditic one, like 80% of all flowers. Pollination in a rose occurs through the interaction of the anther (female) and the stamen (male), and fertilization results when the sperm from the pollen unites with an egg in the flower’s ovary. In these senses, the rose is the direct vegetal equivalent to the human sexual organs, with which it also has physical similarities – the arrangement of petals to the vagina, for example. But the relationship between the rose and human sexual activity was also construed on a directly perceptual level in that the analogy was based on a convergence or parallelism between the rose and sexual desire and its emotions and actions. Through the shape of its flower, spatial arrangement of petals, stamens, leaves, prickles, and cane, the rose was equated with femininity, youth, vivacity, fecundity, love, beauty, pleasure, desire, the delicious pain of passion, the waning of these things
Images courtesy of the Uffizi Museum, Florence.
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.
A Rose a Day No.47
Still-life paintings of roses are a staple of Western art, although they are very rare in East Asian art, at least before the forces of Westernization influenced taste, and made the rose a familiar icon of beauty. But the flatness and all-overness of the composition of this painting stakes a somewhat ‘Oriental’ note.
Two important wild roses that are native to Korea are Rosa multiflora and Rosa rugosa.
Nowadays in Korea, domesticated roses are still less prominent in gardens and parks than in the West, but cut-roses are a very common gift. Korea now has its own home-made hybrid roses, and by coincidence, the centre of the rose-farming business is near where I live in Paju county. There is also a lively Korea Rose Society.
This is an oil painting by a Korean, Lee Kyung Soon. It was made in 2004 and is called ‘Roses in the Garden’. It’s nice to think that her roses, although almost certainly hybrids bred in the West to suit Western taste, actually have Chinese parents, and that is why the flowers have the form they do, repeat blossom, and some are yellow.
Painting courtesy of Lee Kyung Soon and Cho Kheejoo.
A Rose a Day No.46
This lithograph on paper is by the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. It’s entitled “We Won’t Do It without the Rose, Because We can No Longer Think’, and is from 1972.
The Tate Gallery says:
Taken from a photograph by Wilfred Bauer, this lithograph shows Beuys at the desk of his Information Office at documenta V, Kassel in 1972. The Information Office was run under the auspices of the Organization for Direct Democracy, a platform for the propagation of the artist’s radical ideas, which he had founded the previous year. For 100 days Beuys tirelessly debated his ideas with visitors to the exhibition. On the last day, he fought a Boxing Match for Direct Democracy.
Beuys probably had in mind the traditional idea of ‘sub rosa’ - under the rose - meaning, secretly and securely. As a follower of Rudolf Steiner, he may have had in mind the Rose-Cross mediation, which I mentioned in a previous post on the rose and the Occult and mysticism.
But perhaps Beuys was also thinking about the seventeenth century Catholic mystic poet Angelus Silesius in The Cherubinic Wanderer, who evokes the rose as a striking metaphor for living ‘without why’. Humanity, Silesius pointed out, is always doing things. We are aware of our doing, and are often concerned about what others make of our actions, and this, Silesius noted, is precisely the root of our unhappiness. By contrast, Silesius wrote: ‘ The Rose because she is Rose / Doth blossom, never asketh Why; / She eyeth not herself, nor cares / If she is seen of other eye. Silesius used the image of the rose to give beautiful concrete form to the observation that all too often we contract into ourselves in attachment to our own desires, and so we become ‘closed’, cut off by too much self-love. But when we are willing to ‘open’ ourself to God’s gift, we will be truly with God. But this means letting go, or ‘abandoning’ oneself, as only then can the divine rush in, like a rose bloom opening to absorb the sunlight.
Silesius, in his turn, was inspired by the medieval Catholic theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart who believed that the truly spiritual life must be lived without any reason or purpose extraneous to the love of God. Eckhart was specifically protesting against the Catholic moral doctrine of the period that seemed to trade ethical behaviour for the divine favour of the Beatific Vision. Instead, Eckhart suggested that ‘[The just person] wants and seeks nothing, for he knows no why. He acts without a why just in the same way as God does; and just as life lives for its own sake and seeks no why for the sake of which, it lives, so too the just person knows no why for the sake of which he would do something.’ Eckhart therefore counseled that we should strive to exist out of the plenitude of our own being alone. “I live because I live”, he declared. ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground……You should work all your works out of this innermost ground without why.’
In the early nineteenth century, the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson looked out of his window on spring morning of 1840 in Concord, Massachusetts and saw roses in bloom, and wondered why people immediately turn them into symbols instead of just appreciating their joyful presence. The problem, Emerson concluded, lay with the character of a society which inevitably alienates its members:
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think’, ‘I am’, but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These rose under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, writing in the mid-twentieth century, became fascinated by Angelus Silesius’s rose that knows no ‘why’, and sought to free what he saw as a profound existential insight from the limits of metaphysical Christian context and to place it within a modern secular worldview in which the goal was seen to be self-realization. Heidegger noted that in modern culture people value above all mental control, and crave clarity of communication, which is achieved through unambiguous, exact, graspable, objective and concrete information. There is nothing that is without some reason or ground. In other words, we excessively value the head over the heart.
Heidegger argued that the contemporary importance of the spiritual metaphorical rose envisaged by Silesius was that it is telling humanity to strive to live for the sake of life, not in relation to some external purpose. As Heidegger wrote: ‘But blooming happens to the rose inasmuch as it is absorbed in blooming and pays no attention to what, as some other thing – namely, as cause and condition of the blooming – could first bring about this blooming. It does not first need the ground of its blooming to be expressly rendered to it. It is another matter when it comes to humans.’ Heidegger used the word Gelassenheit, or ‘releasement’ , to describe a state of unselfish surrender, letting-be, or will-less existence. Such ‘release’, Heidegger declared, was what it means to live like a rose – ‘without why’.
In a poem entitled ‘Walking Past a Rose This June Morning’ the contemporary British poet Alice Oswald mediates on an encounter with a rose that launches many profound associations. The poem takes the form of a series of unanswerable questions: ‘is my heart a rose? how unspeakable’, Oswald writes. She evokes the deep sense of absolute otherness she feels in the rose’s presence. Oswald’s reactions do not engender tame emotions associated with the kind of domesticated beauty with which the rose is so often associated. On the contrary, the rose puts her in a fluid and intimately entangled relationship with the world. For Oswald, the rose evokes the vulnerability of existential openness that is intrinsic to the ways of the heart. During an interview, Oswald (who used to be a professional gardener) explained that her poem came ‘from the way I always feel when I meet a rose: it's a point of metaphor, and it's so unbelievable that it throws you into a sort of metaphorical and remembered world.’ And then she added: ‘I'm wary of roses because they are used so much as symbols, and yet the actual rose still remains. It's somehow a hinge between the spiritual and the tangible world.’
Image courtesy of the Tate Gallery.
A Rose a Day No.45
This Iranian woman is harvesting the Autumn Damask rose in the Fars region. Where she comes from it is called ‘Gol-e-Mohammadi ‘– ‘Mohammadi Rose’ (‘Muhammed’s Rose’). In Fars, as in other regions of the Near East, such as Syria and Turkey, but also Bulgaria, this rose is an important cash-crop.
The Autumn Damask has two important characteristics: a strong perfume and remontancy. Until recently, it was believed that Northern Persia is the only region where all three of the parents of the Autumn Damask grow together, so it was assumed to be the birth-place of the new species, and that with human assistance the Autumn Damask subsequently spread from there east towards India, south to Arabia, and west into north Africa and Europe, bringing with it the remontancy gene. Persia in particular was a major centre for the cultivation of roses, and the rose was a much loved flower. There was a long-established tradition of growing roses as ornamental plants in gardens. But new research has pushed the origins of the repeat-flowering Damask even further east to the Amu Darya River in the Aral Sea Basin in northern Turkmenistan and southern Uzbekistan, an area north of Afghanistan, which was known as the Transoxiana in Alexander the Great’s time, or the River Oxus of classical Latin and Greek. This discovery, in its turn, leads to the hypothesis that the remontancy gene from Rosa fedtschenkoana which is necessary for there to be the Autumn Damask, comes from further east still, in central Asia or north west China. The Aral sea Basin was the centre of Bactrian civilization between 329 – 125 BC, and was an important point of interface between Central Asia and the Chinese Han Dynasty.
Such is the disparity in the geographical distribution of the roses that hybridized to produce the Autumn Damask that it seem probable their crossing could only have been facilitated through ‘artificial selection’, through conscious human intervention. This hypothesis would then imply that Asiatic rose genes have been an unacknowledged part of the western rose gene pool since at least Roman times. For centuries, traders had been making their way into China and back again along the caravan routes, and plants and seeds came and went with them. Roses could easily have traveled from China along the trade routes which traversed 6, 440 kilometers, and linked China with the west from the 2nd century BC to the 14th century AD, and attempts could have been made long ago to cultivate remontant roses.
Rose water is an important part of daily life in the Middle East, and has been for centuries. When Saladin triumphantly entered Jerusalem in 1167, he ordered the floor and walls of Omar’s Mosque to be washed with rose-water to purify it of the stench of the Crusaders. It was said that five hundred camel loads of rose-water were needed, and that much of it came from Damascus. When Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he had Hagia Sophia cathedral washed with rose water before converting it into a mosque. Rose-water was also used as flavoring ingredients for drinks, and desserts such as ice cream, jam, Turkish Delight, rice pudding, yogurt and sherbet. As we will see in more detail in a future Chapter, rose ointment and rose water were also used for their medicinal benefits. Roses motifs also adorned Persian carpets, featured in miniature painting, and were incorporated into architecture decoration. As Islamic tradition spread and assimilated the indigenous cultures of conquered lands, the rose travelled too. When the Mughal Dynasty invaded in India, it eventually merged Persian with indigenous Indian culture, making the rose an important feature of Indian life.
Another profitable use for the rose in the Middle East was the perfumed attar of roses, which involves distilling volatile oils from the flowers. Knowledge of this process dates from at least the first century AD, and by the ninth century attar of roses was especially being exported from Fars region in Persia to places as far afield as Spain, India, and China. From the tenth to the seventeenth century, Persia was the acknowledged centre of the industry. The Damask rose was cultivated for this purpose especially around Shiraz in the Fars province, and still is to this day, but Rosa centifolia is also used in the Near East. The Moors brought the technology of rose-water production to southern Spain, and the Monghuls to India, and a traditions says that it was actually Queen Noor Jehan in sixteenth century India who discovered rose oil when she collected droplets of the oil from a canal flowing with rose petals. Today, roses for oil a significant cash-crop in regions of India such as Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh. As an enduring legacy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, cultivation of roses for rose-water and rose oil also continues today in Turkey and Bulgaria.
Over the centuries, not much has changed in how roses are cultivated and processed to make oil. In the spring the pickers still work quickly from the early morning, as the harvesting period is short and dependent on the weather. During a cool, cloudy day in spring harvesting can last for a month, while in hotter seasons, for only 16-20 days. The flowers are then brought to sills (copper or iron), mixed with water, and the distillate collected in metal tubing. The primary distillate is then further processed to obtain the desired properties. To produce just one kilogram of rose essence in a still, takes about 12 tonnes of fresh roses. Industrialization of the time honoured practices began in the early twentieth century, especially in Bulgaria, where steam still and volatile extraction systems were developed. Under communism, copper sills were abandoned and the rose farms were collectivized and nationalized. Today, Bulgaria remains a world leader in the production and export of attar. There is even a Valley of the Rose dedicated to the cultivation of the Alba, and especially the Damask Rose, Rosa damscenea trigintipetala, aka the ‘Kazanlik Rose’.
In the twelfth century, returning Crusaders may have carried knowledge of rose distillation back with them to Western Europe on their return home, although it could have arisen independently in Europe. Eventually, the rose became important ingredient for the Western perfume industry. In the sixteenth century around the town of Grasse in southern France, rose cultivation developed for this purpose. But it was pink Cabbage Rose, Rosa centifolia, aka ‘Rose de Provence’ , not the Damask, that is the species of choice, and it remains today at the heart of a thriving business. Dior, Chanel, and Hermès all source their roses in Grasse.
Image:
http://www.iranmirrorbd.com/en/2017/05/10/rose-harvest-season-in-southern-iran/
A Rose a Day No.44
Perhaps the greatest paintings of seductively dangerous roses from the Victorian period were created by the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones: his series called ‘The Legend of the Briar Rose’ (1885-1890), which has been carefully integrated into the décor of the Salon in Buscot House, Oxfordshire, through the extension of the frames and the filling of the intervals with joining panels that continue the rose motif. Under each of the paintings there is written a verse from a poem by William Morris.
The first in the series, called ‘The Briar Wood’ [Illustration], shows the Prince standing on the far left, and the sleeping retinue sprawled amongst the Briars. Morris’ poem is as follows: The fateful slumber floats and flows / About the tangle of the rose; / But lo! the fated hand and heart / To rend the slumberous curse apart!
We know the story of the Briar Rose best as ‘Sleeping Beauty’. A curse means the princess will prick her finger on a rose, and then she and everyone around her will immediately falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years, until she is kissed by a prince. The original ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story is by Charles Perrault, and makes no mention of roses, just ‘’brambles and thorns’. But in the Brothers Grimm’s re-telling the story, called ‘Briar-Rose,’ the princess herself is called the ‘Beautiful Briar-Rose’, or the rose on the thorny briar. It seems likely that the Brothers Grimm chose to develop the theme in relation to the medieval allegory of the Roman de la Rose . But in fact, the story of sleeping beauty goes all the way back to The Book of the 1001 Nights, where it is more obviously about the relationship between sexual desire, violence, and death. This theme is still subliminally there in Perrault’s story, in which the Prince must ‘penetrate’ the enclosing thicket. After ‘awakening’, the princess has two children, and is then tormented by any angry mother-in-law. In the Grimm’s narrative the emphasis is also on the necessity of penetration, but the tale ends when the prince weds ‘Beautiful Briar-Rose’.
Burne-Jones also includes other references to the rose – petals painted on a knight’s shield, and four heraldic ‘Tudor’ roses on a tapestry in Sleeping Beauty's bower:
The star of the suite is definitely the Briar itself – a real rambler. But which species rose is it? Definitely Rosa canina. Burne-Jones shows them as pink buds, then whitish pink fading to white blooms. His specimens are extremely sinuous, and have very aggressive-looking prickles. Although certainly painted from life, this is like no rose one is ever likely to see in reality. It seems to be enveloping the whole world, a primeval rose from the time of the dinosaurs, a huge spiky serpent, although spotted everywhere with lovely small, delicate five-petal white flowers.
There is, in fact, a very personal dimension to Burne-Jones’ painting. The model for the beautiful sleeping princess is the artist’s own eighteen-year-old daughter, Margaret. Her father, evidently feeling ambivalent about her awakening sexuality, made sure the Briar was especially thick and impenetrable so as to prevent any suitor from coming to steal her ‘innocence’ – her ‘rosebud’ – or to ‘de-flower’ her. Tellingly, Burne-Jones doesn’t depict the moment when the Prince achieves his goal, and Briar-Rose is awakened. Instead, he has delayed the moment of ‘surrender’ indefinitely. As long as his daughter/Sleeping Beauty remains asleep, protected by the wildness of the Briar rose, she will never be fully alive, but as soon as she moves she will inevitably be ‘pricked’ and feel pain. The rose symbolizes here the wounding danger of sexuality, particularly young female sexuality, and the social prohibitions that hem it in like the Briar surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. In this sense, one could say the rose in this painting is playing the role of chastity belt. So there is no evidence of penetration, nor any likelihood of it, in Burne-Jones’ paintings. An overwhelming soporific, death-like air pervades all of the works. Everybody except the Prince is fast asleep, and he looks no more than decorous.
Pictures courtesy of Riger Vlitos, Curator of the Farringdon Collection at Buscot Park.
A Rose a Day No.43
This huge rose has been drawn in the sand!
It’s interesting take on Sir Richard Fanshawe poem about the transience of life, in this case aided and abetted by the tide:
Thou blushing rose, within whose virgin leaves
The wanton wind to sport himself presumes,
Whist from their rifled wardrobe he receives
For his wings purple, for his breath perfumes;
Blown in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon,
What boots a life which in such haste forsakes thee.
Sir Richard Fanshawe, ‘A Rose’ [1607]
Thanks to Erin Macairt for sending me this via Instagram: #rachelshiamh, #monolofroelich
A Rose a Day No. 42
Jan Davidsz. de Heem, ‘Vanitas Still-Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses’ (c.1630)
In Protestant countries, the ban on religious imagery obliged artists and their audience to develop other genres with an overtly moralizing content. In such cases, the beauty of the rose was often intended to remind the faithful that the pleasures of this life are transitory and fickle, a theme that derives from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2, which declares: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." A vanitas theme typically places wilting roses as a symbol of death in the company of, for example, a skull, butterflies (symbolizing transformation), or ruined parapets.
In Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘Vanitas Still-Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses’ (c.1630), two cut Centifolia Rose flowers lie to the side of the book, skull, and a glass of water, adding a warm and beguiling note to the otherwise overwhelmingly austere and morbid composition. A vanitas painting conveyed to the prosperous patron who purchased it that the pleasure, money, beauty, and power they were enjoying in this world were not everlasting, and that it was the essence of earthly life to be fleeting and therefore fundamentally lacking in enduring value. But the message was ultimately meant to be one of hope, as on the other side of death for the faithful lay eternal life.
Source: http://collection.nationalmuseum.se/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=23891&viewType=detailView
A Rose a Day No.41
This is a photograph posted a few days ago by my friend Peter Abraham in the UK on Instagram.
This is his website:
https://www.axisweb.org/p/peterabrahams/#info
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.
A Rose a Day No.31
This beautiful rose is called ‘Gertrude Jekyll’. It’s an example of a relatively new family of roses called ‘English Roses’. I have one specimen growing in my garden in France - but this is a photo from the internet.
As their creator David Austin writes:
An English Rose is, or should be, a Shrub Rose. According to variety, it may be considerably larger or even smaller than a Hybrid Tea. But whether large or small, the aim is that it should have a natural, shrubby growth. The flowers themselves are in the various forms of the Old Roses: deep or shallow cup shapes; rosette shapes; semi-double or single, or in any of the unlimited variations between these. They nearly always have a strong fragrance, no less than that of the Old Roses, and their colours often tend towards pastel shades, although there are deep pinks, crimsons, purples and rich yellows.. The aim has been to develop in them a delicacy of appearance that is too often lacking in so many of the roses of our time; to catch something of that unique charm which we associate with Old Roses. Furthermore, English Roses nearly all repeat flower well under suitable conditions.
The breakthrough was a rose called ‘Constance Spry’, released in 1961. As the nursery’s website puts it: ‘The original English Rose. Large, glowing pure rose pink, deeply cupped blooms. Strong myrrh fragrance. Summer flowering only.’ Since 1961, Austin and his team(Austin died in 2018)have produced over 200 ‘English Roses’, and revolutionized how we think about the roses of the present today.
Since the 1980s, there has been a growing trend amongst rose-lovers for ‘new’ roses which still possess some of the endearing characteristics of the old ‘vintage’ garden varieties. The breeders who nurtured and responded to this demand were effectively creating thoroughly historicized roses, and were aware of the rich cultural resonances the rose possesses. They created roses to appeal to people who no longer identified ‘contemporality’ with the rejection of the past. In fact, the new hybrids might be called ‘postmodern’ roses, as they are an indication of a much wider cultural swerve away from an uncompromising cult of the new toward more nuanced relationships with the past. For, in the rush to make the rose the modern rose, the rose of today, much got lost along the way. The aim of the ‘postmodernists’ was to use contemporary scientific knowledge to breed a new race of roses that could unite the best of the old with the best of the new. Like all the various breeders who specialize in producing the ‘heritage’ style roses, Austin make a point of naming their new roses according to the old manner, with great discretion and very good taste , such as these from David Austin: ‘Emily Brontë’, ‘Lady of Shallot’, ‘The Lark Ascending’, and this one, Gertrude Jekyll.
I mentioned the great Edwardian gardener Gertrude Jekyll in my last post. In her book Roses for English Gardens (1902) she opined: ‘Roses are so comparatively modest, they are so accommodating and so little fastidious, that with very moderate preparation and encouragement they can be made to succeed.’
One of the most impressive commercial rose nursery anywhere must be David Austin Roses Ltd. near Wolverhampton in the English Midlands. There is not only a plant centre, tea-room and gift shop, but also six linked rose gardens, with over 700 different varieties or roses. The free sprawling growth of the roses is contained by carefully maintained hedge borders. Each garden has a specific theme, from a formal ‘Victorian Walled Garden’ to an informal ‘Species Garden’. Austin’s own ‘English’ roses are displayed in the “Renaissance Garden.’ David Austin Roses Ltd. provides, one could say, the ‘total’ rose experience. Austin, and the others who have followed his lead, have recognized that the ‘modern’ is only better than the ‘ancient’ if it is proven to be so in recognizable ways.
A Rose a Day No. 27
This is photo take yesterday by Eungbok, my partner, of me and the most common species rose in these parts, Rosa multiflora. It was taken while on a walk on an oak covered hillside near where we live. An important species rose in China, Korea, and Japan, it is similar to the Dog Rose, but with white five petalled flowers rather than pink, and large yellow stamens. The petals are serrated and often heart shaped, and the fragrance very delicate, and when the plant is mature, they come in very profuse clusters or panicles on long, arching canes.
This is the specimen in our garden:
Sometimes, as the petals age, they are tinged with pale pink:
As you can see from the photo of me and Multiflora, it bears a lot or round red hips - the fruit of the rose – in autumn.
A few years ago, I uprooted a specimen of Rosa multiflora from nearby, where it was growing bordering a road, and planted it in our garden. In Korea this rose is commonly called ‘Jjillekkot’ – ‘Mountain Rose’. There is a popular song by Jang Sa-Ik about it. Here is a translation of the first verse:
White flower, Mountain Rose,
Simple flower, Mountain Rose.
Sad like a star, Mountain Rose,
Doleful like the moon, Mountain Rose.
Since hearing this song, I can but see the Multiflora in our garden as sad, an impression that the sparseness, thinness, and the arching trajectory of the canes tends to encourage. We made the mistake of pruning it back a couple of years ago, and it protested by barely blossoming last year. This year, however, it put on a very multifloriferous show. It has also multiplied, and there are now five more Rosa multiflora plants growing in our garden!
Rosa Multiflora is also popular rootstock, especially in colder climates. Early on in my life as a rose gardener I was surprised to find in my garden in France buds growing on some cane whose wood and leaves looked different, and whose blossoms then turned out to be quite different from the rest of the rose. I learned that this was the suckers of the rootstock sprouting from below a portion of the stem and root system onto which a bud eye had been grafted. If you don’t cut these back, they may very well take over, reverting the rose to the rootstock, such as Rosa laxa, ‘Dr. Huey’, or Rosa multiflora. Furthermore, one can uproot a rose and replant it, and then find its rose’s rootstock suckers pushing their way through where the now re-relocated rose once grew. As a result, I have a vigorous Rosa multiflora growing in my French garden, just like the one I transplanted from the nearby hillside in South Korea.
A Rose a Day No.26
My book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ was recently published by Oneworld Publications. So, every day for the fast few weeks I have been posting a picture of a rose. They are surprisingly various. I post the same image on my Instagram page : morleypsimon. But in this blog I write a bit of information about the image to contextualize it.
Today’s roses are a giant Gallica Roses in a Flemish illustration from the medieval bestseller the Roman de la Rose, the most famous product of the medieval art of love. It was first published around 1230, then republished around 1275 with a long supplement by another author.
In keeping with the conventions of the period, the Roman is an elaborate allegory cast as a lover’s dream quest. The Lover yearns to pluck a rose which he has seen on a bush reflected in the Fountain of Love at the centre of a walled garden. But he is initially unable to reach his goal because a thicket of thorns protects the rose. This first part of the Roman was written by an aristocrat, Guillaume de Lorris, who was deeply attached to the noble code of love. At the beginning of the story Guillaume writes:
‘The matter is fair and new; God grant that she for whom I have undertaken it may receive it with pleasure. She it is who is so precious and so worthy of being loved that she ought to be called Rose.’
Guillaume’s narrative, which most scholars believe is unfinished, ends before the Lover gets to pluck the rose – that is, before he attains the object of his desire. But the continuation of the Roman was later by a very different author, one Jean de Meun, a university man rather than an aristocrat, who turns the story into a long and often didactically digressive account that, in many ways, mocks Guillaume’s and the whole courtly love tradition’s delicate and noble goals.
Between the moment of the first sighting and the final deflowering of the Rose, the story the two author share tells of various trials and advice given by a host of allegorical figures including Reason, Chastity, Jealously, Fair Welcome, the God of Love, False Seeming, Constrained Abstinence, Evil Tongue, Courtesy, Largesse, and of course, Venus. But Jean concludes his story as follows:
I grasped the branches of the rose-tree, nobler than any willow, and when I could reach it with both my hands, I began, very gently and without pricking myself, to shake the bud, for it would have been hard for me to obtain it without thus disturbing it. I had to move the branches and agitate them, but without destroying a single one, for I did not want to cause an injury. Even so, I was forced to break the bark a little, for I knew no other way to obtain the thing I so desired.
I can tell you that at last, when I had shaken the bud, I scattered a little seed there. This was when I had touched the inside of the rose-bud and explored all its little leaves, for I longed, and it seemed good to me, to probe its depths. I thus mingled the seed in such a way that it would have been hard to disentangle them, with the result that all the rose-bud swelled and expanded. I did nothing worse than that.
Some lines later, the Lover declares: ‘I plucked with joy the flower from the fair and leafy rose-bush. And so I won my bright red rose. Then it was day and I awoke.’
We don’t need Freud, or an especially dirty mind, to recognize that the quotation from Jean’s finale is a thinly disguised fantasy of sexual dominance and gratification.
Few books have exercised a more profound and enduring influence on the life of any period that the Romaunt of the Rose. It’s popularity lasted for two centuries at least’, wrote the historian Johan Huizinga. “It determined the aristocratic conception of love in the expiring Middle Ages.”[ As the Roman was usually lavishly illuminated, its influence was felt on both a textual and visual level. In the pictures, floral imagery is pervasive, not only because of the importance to the allegorical narrative of the garden setting and the rose-bush, but also as a more abstract decorative motif. In one such illuminated version, a picture shows the moment just before the Lover finally plucks his rose. The deep-pink roses are clearly the Rose de Provins – the Gallica Rose – which would have been very familiar to the readers of the Roman. But it is represented as many times its normal size [Illustration].
One reason for the success of the Roman was the scandal it caused. Insofar as the medieval art of love was all about sexually unconsummated, spiritualized, desire rather than conquest and successful physical gratification, Jean’s ending deliberately seems to throw down a challenge to the conventions of courtly romance. The Lover’s desire is very clearly satisfied. In 1399 the female poet and author Christine de Pisan, writing from within the circle of the court of King Charles VI of France, penned an influential Epistre au Dieu d’Amours (Epistle of the God of Love) in which she condemned the Roman as slandering woman, describing it as nothing better than a handbook for lechers. In effect, Jean had restored love to the world of male adventure and aggression, in which the goal is the indulgence of predatory sexual pleasure and the fulfillment of the prerogatives of procreation.
An influential admirer of the Roman de la Rose was the Englishman Geoffrey Chaucer. As a young man, he began a translation into Middle English, but for reasons unknown only got as far as finishing fragments of Guillaume’s text. The lines I quoted above from the modern English translation to the beginning of Guillaume’s part to the Roman are rendered by Chaucer as follows:
And that is she that hath, ywis,
So mochel pris, and thereto she
So worthy is biloved to be,
That she wel ought, of pris and ryght,
Be cleped Rose of every wight.
A Rose a Day No.23
To my surprise, this year the rose named ‘Simplicity’, which we planted five years ago and that grows next to the steps up to our front door, has decided to blossom again at this late point of the year. No doubt it is celebrating the publication of my book (or the warm daytime weather - it is already dropping below zero at night).
‘Simplicity’ is classified as a ‘Shrub Rose’, and was bred by the American rosarian Warriner in 1978. Its parent is the seedling of ‘Schneewittchen’, a white Polyantha rose bred by the famous German breeder Peter Lambert in 1901. Polyantha roses are characterized by sprays of delicate flowers held above the foliage, and this class is the result of crossing climbing varieties of Rosa multiflora - which is a native of these parts but blossoms only once but from whence it gets it multifloriferousness - and Rosa chinensis, which is the parent from where Polyanthas and ‘Simplicity’ derive their capacity to repeat-flower. This parentage also explains why ‘Simplicity’ is quite happy growing in Korea. It is, in effect, a local.
As the Encyclopedia of Roses writes, ‘Simplicity’ ‘has been introduced all over the world (except Europe) as a healthy, fast-growing, easy-to-grow landscaping rose. Like its parent, ‘Simplicity’ may suffer a little from blackspot [mine does a little, as you can see), but it is extremely free-flowering [mine definitely is!]. In hot climates it flowers all year round [Korea is not a ‘hot climate’].’
Here is the same rose in full bloom in the early summer.
A Rose a Day No.22
The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote in a poem called ‘The Rose’ that begins with the manifesto-like declaration: ‘The rose is obsolete’. He continued: ‘The rose carried weight of love / but love is at an end – of roses’. In other words, a familiar symbol acts as a barrier to the real, and had to be challenged by the invigorating experience of ‘contact’, or ‘sense’. But while Williams began his poem with the seemingly pessimistic declaration of obsolescence, he did not in fact claim it was necessary to abandon the rose altogether, but rather that there must be a return to the rose itself, a pruning away of the associations that have attached themselves over time.
Williams was actually directly inspired by this Cubist collage by the Spanish artist Juan Gris from 1914 called ‘Flowers’, which includes pasted-on photographs of roses. Williams found Gris’ work to be an exemplary model of the modern work of art because, like in Cubism in general, Gris so obviously departed from traditional models through his reductively geometric and abstract structure, the breaking-up of forms into interlocking fragments. Williams concluded: ‘the start is begun / so that to engage roses / becomes a geometry…’. Through the radical rejection of naturalism and realism, painting was renewing itself, and becoming a truly modern art, and along with it, the symbolic rose was also reborn.
A Rose a Day No.21
This is a view of Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire.
The garden is is an excellent example of a formally laid out rose-garden that manages not to seem excessively formalized. The garden dates from the early 1970s when the great advocate of old-style roses, Graham Stuart Thomas, was invited to use part of the land around the abbey to create a garden dedicated to old roses – those bred before 1900. Thomas’ The Old Shrub Roses, published in 1955, launched a post-war rose sub-culture dedicated to the ‘classic’ or garden roses, that is, to roses that existed before the first Hybrid Teas. In his book Thomas wrote with characteristic good sense but undaunting conviction: ‘We all desire as much beauty, colour, fragrance, longevity, and annual goodwill as possible from our plants, and it is the purpose of this book to try to shew how a great group of neglected roses can add to the list of shrubs available for general garden use.’ He would go on to write profusely on the merits of the ‘old shrub roses’, and to put words into action by designing and planting gardens of old roses, such as Mottisfont Abbey.
Mottisfont Abbey is a living memorial to the old European shrub roses, and is helping to ensure their continued survival. I described the garden is ‘formal’, because it is arranged around straight paths and lawns, and has box edging the beds of roses which are usually planted together in the same classes. But as the head gardener Jonny Norton (who took the photographs here) explained to me: ‘Actually the lawn shapes are convex due to the irregular outer walls of the garden. A view from Google earth will confirm this. The impression on the ground, as you say, impresses formality.’ So, the garden certainly doesn’t seem like other formal rose-gardens. One area radiates at an angle from a fountain at the centre of a circular pond. The garden is also walled with red brick, which gives it the air of a secluded ‘secret garden’.
Many of the roses I have discussed are there at Mottisfont: Gallicas, Damasks, Moss Roses, Bourbons, Noisettes, Chinas, Teas, Hybrid Perpetuals. So the rose-garden is also an organic history lesson, revealing – at least in June, because these are almost all once blooming roses – the subtle beauty of the old style rose. The rest of time, however, one can enjoy the perennials, the companion plantings, which extend the pleasure beyond the roses’ time. As Norton says: ‘The uniqueness of this rose garden is indeed the companion garden that enhances the romance of the roses yet allows their dominance.…..But the celebration of the garden is the rose. The rose dominates from early spring through to autumn. During the month of June, for about a week when almost all are in bloom, the rose garden at Mottisfont is absolutely a garden of Paradise.’
Here are some more pictures by Jonny Norton:
A Rose a Day No. 20
Valentine’s Day rose merchandise.
Valentine’s Day in the United States was worth $20.7 billion in 2019. The average American spent $161.96 on gifts, meals, and entertainment, and men spent twice as much as women. In 2018, according to the Society of American Florists, an estimated 250 million roses were produced for the special day in the USA alone. But people also gave and received huge quantities of products with red roses emblazoned on them – cards, chocolates, lingerie.
In 2009 it was estimated that in the United States, the 100 million roses given on Valentine’s Day generate about 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide on the journey from field to florist. To put this in proportion, the average American has a carbon footprint of about 15 metric tons a year, which is the highest in the world. And the carbon footprint of the cut-rose trade will continue to increase, because the Internet has made ordering on-line so effortless, while simultaneously widening the chasm between our commendable intentions and any sense of the real-world consequences of our actions, which have also been highjacked by social media in cahoots with commercial interests. All this means that rather than taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and giving out oxygen, like normal plants, cut-roses are actually adding to the disastrous toxic payload.
That’s quite a tarry for an anniversary that seems to have been invented by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century. His The Parliament of Fowls includes a love debate among birds who choose their mates on ‘Saint Valentine’s Day’, and this is the first known mention of the annual festival of love. He seems to have consciously fabricated the festival, introducing it to the English court as a special courtly-love anniversary, loosely derived from Catholic tradition. The historical precedents include the fact that in the fifth century, Pope Gelasius made February 14th St. Valentine’s Day, after a martyred bishop, Saint Valentine of Terni. There is some documentary evidence supporting a link between this saint and ideas of fertility, but it isn’t substantial enough to warrant the forging of a concrete alliance that makes Valentine’s Day the day of lovers. But thanks to Chaucer, by the middle of the 18th century friends and lovers were exchanging small tokens of affection or handwritten notes on February 14th.
The arrival of printing technology capable of mass-producing greeting cards, the emergence of the advertising industry, and cheaper postage rates, encouraged the channeling of expressions of amorous affection towards this one particular anniversary. Roses were already traditionally associated with love, a fact reflected in the nineteenth century vogue for floriography – the ‘language of flowers’ – where different flowers stood for different emotions. The red rose was associated with deep love, becoming the flower of choice to signal one’s love for someone. So in this way, the grounds for the co-opting of the rose for an anniversary celebrating love became more or less inevitable, despite the fact, of course, that February is not a month known for its rose blossom.