More on Roses
A Dog Rose as painted by Redouté
In late April 2020, while I was writing my current book, By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose, to be published by Oneworld, it was announced that a local municipal authority in Japan were snipping off thousands of rosebuds in a popular public park in a desperate attempt to stop people congregating there to admire the blossoms when they arrived in early May, thereby encouraging the spread of Covid-19. Thoughts of a team of grim Japanese gardeners frantically decapitating rosebuds, brought to mind Morticia (played by Angelica Huston) in the movie The Addams Family (1991) who is shown snipping off all the blood-red flowers of a climbing rose with gleeful diligence.
One of the sad implications of this news story for me was how it vividly exposed humanity’s cruelty, unleashed against nature but also against itself, and enacted, apparently, for the collective or greater good - in order to protect people. But one has to ask what kind of life is it we are protecting that demands such a bizarre act? Fortunately, however, these panic measures were newsworthy mainly because of their extreme and perverse nature. But nevertheless, we should not see them as wholly exceptional, but as the exaggerated expression of the pervasive crisis whose end is far from in sight.
Why a book about roses? In a past post I explained how I first became fascinated by the rose as a plant and a symbol. In this one, I’ll talk a bit more about the theme, as it now presents itself to me.
The iconic American ‘Hippy’ band, Grateful Dead had a thing about roses. The cover of their second album, released in 1971, shows a drawing of a skull garlanded with red roses. Here it is:
The image was lifted and adapted from an illustration in an edition of the Sufi classic, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The Sufi’s also had a thing about roses. As Grateful Dead band member Robert Hunter puts it: ' I've got this one spirit that's laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can't get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It's a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses."
So there’s the reason for a book on the rose. It gives me a chance to talks about ‘dare I say it, life’. This is from the beginning of the Introduction to my book (as it stands now):
Man hands on misery to man’, writes the English poet Philip Larkin with his characteristically stoic resignation. But man also hands on pleasure, love, passion, beauty, compassion, enchantment and hope, and, to these propitious ends, flowers have proven very useful and ubiquitous allies for thousands of years. We manipulate them without fear to construct pleasing, consoling and rejuvenating material environments and mental pictures. But of all the flowers, it is the rose that has been most often coopted to ‘whisper of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell’d’, as another English poet, John Keats, puts it. The rose has helped to generate atmospheres conducive to the intimacies of the heart. It has provided a beautiful material form for the tenor, the meaning, sense, and content of the tenderer dimensions of our lives. As a gift, an offering, a resonant symbol, a focus of aesthetic attention, a medicine, a distilled oil, a perfume, a culinary ingredient, and as a plant lovingly cared for and cultivated, the rose has participated in social transactions that help establish, nurture, and sometimes end relationships between the living, the living and the dead, the divine and the everyday, the human and the non-human. Above all, the rose has served as one of the most enduring and pervasive images of a benign human future: a promise of happiness.
Today, the rose is probably the world’s favourite flower, and it is effectively binding together people of very different social backgrounds and positions, and historically and geographically distant cultures. It is no exaggeration to say that in the Western world, roses may even be one of the very first things a new born baby sees, as a bouquet of roses is such a common gift for new mothers. Subsequently, roses will enter this human’s life in many physical guises - organic, painted, sartorial, aromatic, imaginary. In fact, when you come to think of it, roses are likely to be present at all the most important moments in your life: births, birthdays, courtships, intimate dinners, marriages, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, funerals.
The United States of America adopted the rose as its national flower quite recently, in 1986 during the Reagan era, when a powerful pro-rose lobby won out against the botanical competition, which included the marigold, dogwood, carnation, and sunflower. The statement supporting the advocacy, says much about the ubiquity of the rose within Western (and Westernized) culture:
‘They grow in every state, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Fossils show they have been native of America for millions years.
The only flower recognized by virtually every American is the Rose.
The name is easy to say and recognizable in all western languages.
It is one of the few flowers in bloom from spring until frost.
It has exquisite colours, aesthetic form, and a delightful fragrance.
Growth is versatile, from miniatures a few inches high to extensive climbers.
Roses mature quickly and live long.
They add value to property at minimal expense.
The range of varieties is such that there are roses to suit everyone.
As no other flower, the rose carries its own message symbolizing love, respect, and courage.’
Writing about the ‘queen of flowers’ hasn’t been easy while the world as we know it convulses in collective pain and uncertainty. And hopefully, the rose will remain for our children and their children, and their children’s children, a promise of happiness.