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. 

A Rose a Day No.19

This is William Blake’s  presentation of his famous poem ‘The Sick Rose’ :

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Against the grain of the usual  rose symbolism, Blake brings out dimensions of dangerous sexual desire. The rose embodies the erotically charged violence of nature:  ‘The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm”. The  ‘bed of crimson joy’ can be interpreted as a metaphor for a woman’s vagina being self-stimulated. Then again,  seen from a different but equally unsettling interpretative angle,  these same words may indicate  an aggressive act of penetration   by a male ‘worm’, or penis.

But perhaps  the rose  symbolizes the illicit and danger of promiscious sex, and the  ‘invisible worm’ is actually syphilis, a venereal disease which could be contracted or  congenital. In Blake’s time,   doctors couldn’t see the syphilis bacteria, which,  being a sexually transmitted disease, “flies in the night’. A common metaphor for syphilis was ‘Amor’s poisoned arrow’, thereby linking the disease to the rose via Venus’s son.  In Hamlet, Shakespeare juxtaposes the rose and disease in order to describe the calumny of Claudius usurpation of the throne and the marriage to his  mother.   Hamlet says: “Such an act/...Calls virtue a hypocrite, takes off the rose/ From the fair forehead of an innocent love / And sets a blister there” (Hamlet, 3.4.42-45).  Shakespeare also uses the metaphor of the serpent for syphilis in Hamlet, thereby linking the disease to Eve’s temptation.

Analysis has subsequently revealed that the syphilis virus, Treponema pallidum, a microscopic organism called a spirochete, really is worm-like in shape. But  in yet another reading of the same few lines, Blake might    be understood to allude to  something quite different: the inhibitions imposed by religious upbringing on young people as they start to explore their sexuality.

This is quite a heavy interpretative load for a poem of just eight lines. Blake’s poem  shows just how flexible, how polysemic,  the rose as a metaphor had become by this period.  He also reminds us that we fail to do full justice to the rose if we don’t also pursue it into the   chthonic depths, where it is sometimes employed to reveal complex  and contradictory psychosexual dimensions.

A Rose a Day No.18

An especially moving place to see roses in the company of the dead is the Somme in north-west France. Another flower, the poppy, is of course most famously associated with the First World War, but the rose also played an important role. In fact, the War gave birth to a brand new rose-woman symbol: the Red Cross nurse. Here are the last two verses of a popular song from 1916:

There's a rose that grows in no-man's land

And it's wonderful to see

Though its sprayed with tears,

it will live for years

In my garden of memory

It's the one red rose the soldier knows

 It's the work of the Master's hand

 'Neath the War's great curse stands a Red Cross nurse

 She's the rose of no-man's land.

The region of the Somme is still today predominantly rural, and in many places you can see the traces of trench-lines, and shell and mine craters left over from the years of fighting. On the first day of what became known as the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916, the British sustained an appalling 57,470 casualties, with 19,240 killed, and as it was agreed by the combatants that the fallen should be buried as near as possible to where they died, the area around the front line in the Somme is  recorded by small and sometimes large cemeteries. The one illustrated is Gommecourt British cemetery No.2, near the village of Hébuterne, about 25 miles south-west of Arras.  It contains 1,357 burials and commemorations, of which 682 are unidentified, commemorated with the simple epitaph ‘A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR. KNOWN UNTO GOD’.

The British, French, and Germans each adopted their own style for interring the ‘glorious’ dead. To read the names on the cemetery headstones, or the simple phrase ‘A Soldier Known Unto God’ carved on the headstones is profoundly moving. Among the immaculately maintained lines of headstones in the many British Somme cemeteries, bunches of roses in various stages of decomposition are usually in evidence, as well as plastic ones, resting upon the graves or next to them where someone had left them. But roses also grow in the cemeteries’ own flowerbeds. My visit was made in wintertime, alas, so there were no flowers, and the cemeteries’ severely pruned specimens looked like miniature versions of No-Man’s-Land.

Whichever nation we are from, the convention is to leave roses for our war dead, and even though the ones I saw upon the British graves in the Somme were almost certainly purchased in French florists (and not even French, as they were no doubt shipped in from the Netherlands or even Kenya) in this context they are somehow quintessentially British roses – lying or growing there in the corner of the ‘foreign field’ celebrated in a poem by Rupert Brooke.

During and after the War there was also a great demand for memorial roses back home. Every village and town in Britain, France, and Germany had a War Memorial built. London had the Cenotaph. One poem of the period, written by a real ‘Rose of No-Man’s-Land’, the nurse Charlotte Mew, called ‘On the Cenotaph (September 1919),’ includes the following sorrowful lines:

And over the stairway, at the foot—oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread

Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things

Speaking so wistfully of other Springs

From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.

 Ernst Jünger, a citizen of the land responsible for the annihilation of the British during the Battle of the Somme, used the symbolism of the rose to great effect in Storm of Steel,  his memoir of fighting on the Western Front, published in 1920. He reflected on the restless spirit that made young men like him so eager to go off to war and to exalt in death. ‘Grown up in an age of security,’ he wrote, ‘we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses.’

A Rose a Day No.17

This picture was sent to me yesterday by my neice, Erin Macairt. A lovely red rose blooming in her garden in south Wales in late October.

It looks like a Hybrid Tea, but as there are many red varieties it’s difficult to tell which one exactly.

The typical Hybrid Tea has long slender, high-centered buds, carried singly on long, slender, upright stems, wihich gives it an erect plant form. Its flowers are large but not too full, having larger outer and smaller inner petals which unfurl without losing their cup-like form. These flowers can vary considerably in colour, are vigorous, and borne over long periods. Sound familiar? It should, because these characteristics still remain today the dominant ones of roses in our gardens and parks.

Hybrid Teas inherited their petal shape and their remontancy characteristic - their capacity to bloom repeatedly over a long period - from being crosses with Chinese parents (of which, more in a future post). This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers from the late nineteenth century.  Before this period, almost all roses in the West only blossomed once, for two or three weeks in the springtime.

You can hear me discussing roses on BBC Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' with Rebecca Solnit (who has just published a book called 'Orwell's Roses') and others on 21st October (today) at 10.00pm BST.

By the way, check our Erin’s work on Etsy: Land of Erin:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/market/land_of_erin

A Rose a Day No.16

The signature on this watercolour may come as a surprise: P. Mondriaan.

Yes, that’s right, that’s the same painter of coloured squares and rectangles. Mondrian painted works like this to make a bit of money, as the clientele for his ‘Neo-Plasticism’ was very small.

Here are some more Mondrian roses:

There are no doubt those who would have preferred Mondrian had stuck to roses. But perhaps he did. For we can imagine his more familiar works as aerial views of beds of red and yellow roses (the blue is water). Although as Mondrian is Dutch, we should probably infer tulips……..

A Rose a Day No.15

In 1949, the year the USSR conducted its first nuclear test, the artist Boris Vladimirksi painted ‘Roses for Stalin’, the work illustrated above. It depicts smiling Soviet children handing ‘Uncle Stalin’ a big bunch of white and red roses, and the artist has painted the red of the roses in exactly the same hue as the boys’ Communist Party bandanas. The red rose had become the official flower of the Socialist International in the nineteenth century, but in this painting it is exploited as part of the Stalinist ‘cult of children’ which began in the 1930s and sought to cast Stalin as a benign leader with the future of Soviet children at heart. ‘Thanks to Beloved Stalin for Our Happy Childhood’ runs a caption to a poster from 1950 showing a smiling boy and girl presenting Josef Stalin with a bouquet of red roses (this time of a deeper red hue than the bandana):

Adolf Hitler also systematically abused the traditionally benign message carried by roses, and many propaganda photographs show women and children offering him roses and other flowers – a photograph of the opening day of the Berlin Olympics of 1936 shows Hitler receiving a bouquet including roses from the five year old daughter of the organizer of the event:

A Rose Day No.14

This is a plastic rose. It simulates the apparance of a typical Hybrid Tea variety. This one comes from IKEA. It retails here in Korea for 2,900 Won, which is about 2.50 GBP. I have one in my studio arranged in a wine bottle, and it is always in perfect full bloom!

For me,  the most poignant plastic roses are the three white ones that someone attached to the base of the lamppost outside our house in central France. They marked the spot near where a young man, late one icy night, skidded on the road, lost control of his car, crashed through our front wall, and landed in our garden, where he died. We weren’t staying in the house at the time, and the people who were had the terrible ordeal of discovering what happened. This was several years ago now, and for three or four years the plastic roses stayed loosely tethered to the lamppost, getting grimier and grimier, and constantly flopping over.  I would regularly prop them up again. But whoever put them there seemed to have forgotten about their tribute, and they never tried to replace the roses. So, in the summer of 2016, and after quite a bit of deliberation, I decided they had been there long enough, and quietly threw them away. Dust had gathered, the colour faded, the plastic decomposed. People forget. And time leaves its trace even on a plastic rose.

A Rose a Day No.13

This rose-themed brassiere is a distant relative to the ‘bossom rose’ worn by Manon Balletti, illustrated in A Rose a day No. 1. They even look like the same rose - Rosa Centifolia, the Cabbage Rose.

It’s Valentine’s Day lingerie merchandise, and I will be posting on this rose-oriented event later. It’s also a reminder that the symbolic hybrid ‘rose-woman’ is still alive and well. But while the rose continues to be a symbol employed to celebrate feminine beauty and sexual allure, we are increasingly troubled by the stark and imbalanced asymmetry of routinely comparing a woman to a rose, and decorating her with them, while a man is compared to an animal like the lion, bear or wolf. Here is Naomi Wolfe in The Beauty Myth (1991):

‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to woman in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves, ‘Beauty’ is not universal or changeless, though the West pretends that all ideals of female beauty stem from one Platonic ideal woman.

A Rose a Day No.12

Artists often depicted Mary seated in a formal rose arbor in the company of thornless roses and angels and saints, as in  Stephan Lochner’s ‘Madonna in a Rose Arbor’ (1440-42) But in Sandro Botticelli’s beautiful ‘The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child’ (c.1485), the ‘closed garden’ becomes a more informal setting in which Gallica Roses enclose and protect mother and child.

For Roman Catholics Virgin Mary is simultaneously the Mother of God -  including the ‘Mater Dolorosa’ or the suffering mother - and the Blessed Virgin. She is the ‘second Eve’, who cleanses humanity of the sins of the first Eve. In the fourth century, Saint Ambrose wrote: ‘Let, then, the life of Mary be as it were virginity itself, set forth in a likeness, from which, as from a mirror, the appearance of chastity and the form of virtue is reflected’. Saint Jerome (347-420AD) emphasized Mary’s perpetual virginity, even as he also praised her as Christ’s mother, saying that ‘the mother of the Son [of God], who was a mother before she was a bride, continued a Virgin after her so was born.’ Mary was called upon to personify the virgin, bride, mother, queen, mourner. She was full of divine grace, a spiritual intercessor, dispenser of grace to the faithful, and principle of transcendent spiritual union. Mary was, indeed, ‘alone of all her sex’, as the fifth century poet Caelius Sedulius wrote.

In order to help give tangible form to the complex symbolism of the Virgin Mary, the Church evolved a ‘Marian’ rose through progressively neutralizing its associations with paganism, downplaying it sensual perfume and symbolically removing its dangerous thorns, and the Virgin Mary is known as the ‘rose without thorns’. Note that Botticelli’s Gallica roses therefore have no prickles. A flower that had been closely allied with the Mother Goddess, and especially with eros, was re-planted in the Christian garden as the flower of agape.

Saint Jerome described Mary as the ‘rosa pudoris’, the rose of modesty, and argued that the roses that grew in the Garden of Eden were without thorns, and only gained them only as a result of the Fall. Eve is the thorn-bush, and Mary the rose flower. The prickles therefore symbolize Original Sin. A common term of address for the Virgin became the 'rose without thorns', since she was immaculately conceived. The sixteenth century writer of sermons, Cornelius van Sneek wrote: ‘And as in the morning the rose opens, receiving dew from heaven and the sun, so Mary’s soul did open and receive Christ the heavenly dew.’ She was the model of faith in the word of God. It was said that on the third day after the Virgin Mary’s burial, mourners at her tomb found her body had vanished gone and that her shroud was full of roses. ‘Mary is the most beautiful flower ever seen in the spiritual world…..and therefore, is called the Rose, for the rose is called of all flowers the most beautiful’, wrote the English Catholic convert Cardinal Newman at the end of the nineteenth century in an essay that sought to explain the multi-layered symbolism of the Marian rose as it had coalesced by that period.

But the rose’s characteristic botanical morphology  - the fact that it has a beautiful flower and also dangerous thorns - poses a basic theological problem which coul bde rendered as the question: Why does the God of Love make us suffer? The roses in the Garden of Eden are said by the Church to be thorn-less, and it was the Fall that produced the prickles. The Virgin Mary, the Second Eve, is there to intercede to redeem humanity from sin. But, as the historians Anne Baring and Jules Cashford observe: ‘Mary has what divinity she has not because she offers an image of the whole nature in all its manifest and unmanifest mystery, but only by virtue of being set apart from the laws of nature within which humanity is held.’

When the rose is imagined without thorns, it is no longer very closely linked to any real rose (although, there are indeed a few real roses without thorns). But then, the Marian rose is purely allegorical.

A Rose a Day No.11

This rose, named ‘Gloire de Dijon’, aka the ‘Glory Rose’, is classed as a Tea Rose, although often goes with the Noisettes. As one of the first Western yellow coloured and repeat-flowering roses, it is of some significance for the future development of the modern rose.

‘Gloire de Dijon’ was the first big success of the great French breeder Guillot fils, and dates from 1853, and for the rest of the century was one of the most acclaimed of all the new varieties.  Dean Hole, the greatest advocate of the rose in Victorian Britain (more on him in a future post)  wrote: ‘and if ever, for some heinous crime, I was miserably sentenced, for the rest of my life, to possess but a single Rose-tree, I should desire to be supplied, on leaving the dock, with a strong plant of Gloire de Dijon". More recently, Peter Beales, author of one of the most important books on old or ‘classic’ roses, writes: ‘This is a deservedly well-loved, old variety, made more famous by the writings of the Rev. Deans [sic] Hole, first President of the National Rose Society. This gentleman seems to have persuaded almost each new incumbent that the thing to do was plant one in the garden of every rectory in the late Victorian era.” 

Perhaps it was in a Nottingham rectory’s garden that D. H. Lawrence first made his acquaintance with ‘Gloire de Dijon’. In his greatest rose-poem, ‘Gloire de Dijon” (1917), he takes on the overcrowded poetic convention in which a beautiful woman is compared with a rose, and manages to rescue the cliché from the clutches of popular sentimentality on the one hand and idealism on the other. The woman Lawrence describes is Frieda von Richthofen, who left her family to live with him:

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders

Glisten as silver, they crumple up

Like wet and falling roses, and I listen

For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.

In the window full of sunlight

Concentrates her golden shadow

Fold on fold, until it glows as

Mellow as the glory roses.

Through the colour gold and the act of spying of a woman as she bathes, Lawrence assimilates his experience of the beauty of his lover to a long history via invoking the goddess of love, ‘Golden Aphrodite’, and Artemis, goddess of wild animals and the hunt. But by the simple act of naming a specific rose Lawrence also succeeds in making his vision credible and tangible, in contact with the real world. 

A Rose a Day No.10

This is one of the oddest paintings in the National Gallery, London. It’s also one ot he oddest of all paintings including roses.

It is a work by the Flemish painter Quinten Massys and is entitled ‘An Old Woman’ (c.1513) or ‘The Ugly Duchess’. The grotesque old temptress is holding a tiny pink rosebud – symbol of feminine beauty and sexual ripeness – in her ageing hand up against a bulging and overripe décolletage. A few rooms away is the work I discussed in A Rose A Day No.1, Jean-Marc Nattier’s Rococo period portrait of Manon Balletti. What a contrast!

A Rose a Day No.9

Poster for ‘Amerian Beauty’ (1999)

In the Oscar-winning film American Beauty (1999) red roses are everywhere, and are especially important as a symbol.

Cut roses, rose bushes in gardens, rose patterns on clothes, and most memorably, roses in fantasy sequences in which the lead character, played by Kevin Spacey, who is lusting after the schoolfriend of his own daughter, sees rose petals cascading down on her naked body, and floating out as she opens her shirt. 

But all these roses, the movie implies, are false. They are facile and banal symbols of beauty, desire, and truth because they have become so over-familiar and lacking in originality. The rose is an empty surrogate for beauty, whose function it is to mimic the real thing in ways that are wholly conformist and manageable. By being conditioned to identify with such a commonly recognized and commodified image, people are actually prevented from any possibility of experiencing real beauty, which is not fabricated or easy, and is available to everyone, free of charge.

 In the movie, the few individuals who have self-motivated and spontaneous experiences of beauty – with a plastic bag wafting in the air, for example (but never with roses) – are self-confessed ‘freaks’. American Beauty reminds us that authentic symbols comes from active, open, and original engagements with the world, and always involve something new and spontaneously experienced. If everyone wasn’t  so conditioned by the sterile values of society they too would see that a plastic bag floating in the breeze, a bit of ugly garbage of no apparent worth, can be where beauty is found. In modern American society, and by implication, Western society as a whole, or so the movie suggests, genuine experiences, the movements of the heart with which beauty is associated, have become increasingly impossible. The suburban rose-bush and the vases of cut roses are the real ‘garbage’, because they conceal the capacity to truly express from the heart. 

There actually is a rose called ‘American Beauty’ – a red Hybrid Perpetual. It was a French creation from 1885, whose breeder, Lédéchux, named it “Madame Ferdinand Jamin’. But it was astutely re-Christened for the American market.  ‘American Beauty’ has a strong, sweet scent, and repeat blooms a little. The Encyclopedia of  Roses observes: ‘It was a popular cut-flower rose in the late 19th-century…..Unfortunately, it is susceptible to all the fungal diseases that affect roses: blackspot, mildew, and rust.’ (p.30) Another association no doubt triggered by the title of the movie is Frank Sinatra’s shmaltzy song ‘American Beauty Rose’. In fact, for a time, the ‘American Beauty’ rose was the most famous rose in America. As Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello write in A Rose by Any Name. The Little-Known Lore and Deep-Rooted History of Rose Names (2009) write: ‘The lasting fame of ‘American Beauty’ made it the fail-safe cut flower for generations of nervous hostesses, bashful beaux, and penitent spouses – and an easy target for satire.’ (p. 8)

But the roses seen in the movie  are not the ‘American Beauty’ rose. See for yourself. This is ‘American Beauty’:

xxx

A Rose a Day No.8

To celebrate the recent publication of my new book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ by Oneworld, I am posting a rose a day for a while. You can see a new image every day on my Instagram account, morleypsimon. Here, I give a bit of context about the same image.

Today: death and the rose.

The rose lends itself almost as readily as a metaphor referring to death as it does to love. It renders visible in an acceptable form the ineffable otherness of death. It contains death. By budding, blooming, withering, dying and decaying in such a short period of time, one can say the rose (or any flower) actually enacts death.

Many British people will have strong memories of the mountains of flowers left as a memorial to Princess Diana in September 1997, and many Americans, those left at Ground Zero after 9/11. Not long after the terrorist attacks of November 2015, I was in Paris, and happened to walk passed the Bataclan club, where more than 100 people attending a pop concert had recently died at the hands of Islamicist terrorists. All along the railings on the opposite side of the road were various forms of tribute, including plenty of roses in many colours. 

These instances of memorializing flowers are directly linked to a recently excavated graves near Mt. Carmel, Israel, which has been dated to between 13,700 and 11,700 years ago, because the site reveals the impressions made by flowers and other plants that seem to have been deliberately placed under the bodies prior to their internment. But the modern day use of roses in particular as a tribute in relation to death  is even more closely linked to a rose garland discovered in 1880 in a tomb in Hawarra, Egypt, which is today preserved in Kew Gardens, London. The date of the burial is put at 170AD. When archeologist rehydrated the dried flowers in the garland, they found it to be a species rose named Rosa richardii, which is also known as Rosa abyssinica or Rosa sancta, and, more colloquially, as ‘Saint John’s Rose’ and ‘Holy Rose of Abyssinia’. The Romans often commemorated their dead with rose offerings. Funerary associations visited tombs regularly to scatter roses on graves, and to deck funerary portrait-statues. By adorning a tomb with roses in springtime, the cyclical nature of life was demonstrated in a beautiful manner. Many inscriptions record foundations for the annual strewing of roses, poppies, and violets on graves, and those who could afford it gave instructions for the creation and upkeep of the gardens next to their tombs. As one poem-epitaph puts it:

Sprinkle my ashes with pure wine and fragrant oil of spikenard:

Bring balsam, too, stranger, with crimson roses.

Tearless my urn enjoys unending spring.

I have not died, but changed my state.

On the walls and vaults of tombs, paintings of red roses on white grounds and images of rose-gardens where also common, allowing the Romans to step more firmly outside the natural order. For while a real rose was an ephemeral offering, a painted one remained unchanged all the year round, and so was a pictorial ‘unending spring’, at least for as long as the paint remained, and the tomb was not destroyed.  

Within the context of rites surrounding death, flowers have an obvious practical function. Their pleasant odours mask the fetid ones of putrefaction. But for the living, the visual beauty and beguiling scent of flowers also stimulates  happy memories, a primordial sense of the joyfulness of life in the face of loss. Flowers establish emotionally affirming relationships. They remove some of the sting of death through merely being beautiful, and so spaces of ritual mourning become places where the living can share time with the departed amongst symbols of joy. But in leaving flowers as token of remembrances, the living plant has also first to be picked – plucked – just like the human has been ‘plucked’ from life. In this sense, the convention of offering flowers can satisfy the desire to control and overcome nature, to reaffirm the power that regulates the community, bringing order through contesting the unruly forces that lie beyond human control. In fact, the strewing of roses and other flowers can be a way to fabricate within the minds of the living an ideal world in which no one dies. Flowers belong to external nature, but are made part of an internal, imaginatively fired reality where nature does not necessarily hold sway.

The brief flowering period of the Western roses made them especially poignant in this regard. ‘So passeth, in the passing of a day / of mortall life, the leafe, the bud, the flowre’’, writes the sixteenth century poet Edmund Spenser of a rose. Sir Richard Fanshawe, a century later, directly addresses a rose, and his erotic imagery serves to drive home more powerfully the sobering message:

 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. 

As today’s picture demonstrates, nowadays many of the roses and other flowers we use to commemorate death are plastic (and in appallingly sentimental taste). These plastic roses will not wither and die within days, and so are more effective at suggesting an ‘unending spring.’ Some of them are designed to be planted in plastic pots filled with fake soil and placed on or next to the grave of the departed loved one. As people tend not to look too closely, such surrogates provide enough of the consoling effect of the real thing. The vegetal original is no longer required, as enough of the meaning of the symbol survives the transformation of the source into a representation, a simulacrum, or low-resolution copy. This still has the capcicity to trigger the necessary positive associations.  One could say that memory and tradition furnish the grounds for the cathartic practice of presenting flowers in remembrance of dead loved ones rather than the actual organic flowers themselves. But much of the subtle underlying value implicitly encoded in the tradition cannot possibly be fully carried over once the connection to the living source is severed. One could even say that a memorial offering of plastic roses feeds the dangerous illusion that we have placated, dominated, and domesticated death, and so can continue to enjoy the fruits of life in blissful ignorance of our inevitable fate. 

A Rose a Day No. 7

Persian painting of a rose bush and nightingale. Nineteenth Century.

The association between the rose and the nightingle in Persian literature is very ancient. But it was especially popular during the Safavid [1501-1722] and Qajar [1785-1925] eras.The rose is the beloved and the nightingale the lover, and this could be understood on scared or profane levels. In relation to the former, when Islam became the dominant religion in the region the rose became known as Gol Mohammadi – Muhammed’s Rose, and was a staple especially of Sufi literature (as we will see in a future post) Symbolically, the relationship pits the beautiful and proud, but often cruel rose (it has thorns) against the nightingale which sings perpetually of its amorous longing and devotion. A famous version of the story tells of how the rose became red: the nightigale pricks its breast and the blood stains the rose’s petals.

In this painting, as is usually the case in Persian art, the rose is very clearly a Damask. This rose is one of the most important of the ‘Western’ (as opposed to ‘Eastern’ or Chinese) roses. It is a large, straggly bush, and the flowers of the different varieties in the family can be single or semi-double. They have a delicate pink hue, and tend to nod downwards (although not here). But most importantly, as far as its practial usefulness is concerned, the Damask has a strong, pleasantly sweet fragrance, and was from ancient times much sought after for the production of rose-water, rose oil, and cosmetics, and especially cultivated profusely as a cash-crop in what are now Iran and Syria. It perhaps takes its familiar European name from the city of Damascus.

Recent DNA analysis has revealed that the Damask is the result of the union not of two but of three species roses, and two distinct stages of pollination, involving Rosa moschata, Rosa gallica, and Rosa fedtschenkoana. In the first stage, a Rosa moschata was pollinated by a Gallica, and this mutation was then pollinated by a Fedtschenkoana, bringing into existence at some unknown time and region the rose we now call the Damask.

Oscar Wilde published a short story entitled ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1888), in which retells the old Persian story. But in his version the poor nightingale sacrifices itself for the sake of a lovelorn but overly intellectual student who is pinning for the delightful but superficial daughter of his professor. All she needs to make her happy, the student overhears the young lady say, is one red rose. But as there are only white ones available, the student feels he cannot court her. The nightingale listens and sees him weeping, and filled with compassion decides to help by piecing its own heart with the thorn of a white rose, thereby willingly sacrificing its own life. The red rose is created. The student plucks it, and then hastens to give it to his love interest. But she just laughs at him, and scoffs that the chamberlain’s nephew has already given her something much more to her taste: real jewels. “Why, I don't believe you have even got silver buckles to your shoes as the Chamberlain's nephew has”, she mocks. As a result of this rebuff Wilde’s student is led to lament: 

 What a silly thing Love is…… It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.

The purpose of Wilde’s story is to stress that the nightingale has risen above the young people’s sentimental failings through useless sacrifice. Wilde casts it as an allegory of the struggle between crass materialism and the transcendent power of art-for-art’s-sake, equating beauty with a higher universal truth lying above a material world soiled by petty dreams and selfish vices.  

A Rose a Day No. 6

By delightful coincidence, I arrived at Gallery JJ in Seoul, where I am having an exhibition of my paintings, to discover that a present had been left by a former student of mine at Dankook University. As far as I know, the student has no idea I’ve just published a book about the rose, and so the gift of a bouquet of plastic roses was a lovely surprise. They have been sprayed with a ‘rose’ scent. Why give real roses, which soon decay, when you can give plastic ones that will last, well, almost for ever.

But maybe my student does in fact know about my avocation as a secret rosarian. But whatever the case, this is sound evidence that the symbolic rose has well and truly colonized the Republic of Korea.

Thank you, Yang Ji-Hye!

And, here are installation shots of my show (no roses). For more information, visit: www.galleryjj.org

A Rose a Day No. 5

In the latter part of his career the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte became  interested in the rose’s compelling cultural significance. In a letter from late 1951 he wrote: "My present research, at the beginning of the winter, is concerned with the rose. I must find something precious and worthy to say about it.” In ‘The Blow to the Heart’ (1952) [Illustration], Magritte seems to have painted what he discovered. A single red rose of the modern Hybrid Tea variety is shown growing on bare ground next to the ocean. Instead of prickles, it sports a large golden dagger. In a letter to the poet Paul Eluard, Magritte wrote: 

for about two months I have been looking for a solution to what I call 'the problem of the rose.’ My research now having been completed, I realize that I had probably known the answer to my question for a long time, but in an obscure fashion, and not only I myself but any other man likewise. This kind of knowledge, which seems to be organic and doesn't rise to the level of consciousness, was always present, at the beginning of every effort of research I made.... After completion of the research, it can be 'easily' explained that the rose is scented air, but it is also cruel.

Magritte’s insight was not entirely original, but his painting certainly made something that is always latently present strikingly manifest. I already mentioned the Sufi Sa’di, who declared that there is no rose without thorns, meaning that any desirable outcome inevitably has its disappointments and struggles, and this same wisdom is also found within mystical Christianity. The Catholic mystic Angelus Silesius writes: ‘Beauty I dearly love, and yet / I think that Beauty scarce adorns / Aught that I see, unless I find / It always set about with thorns.’  What these different voices remind us of is that the special power of the rose as a metaphor and symbol emanates from its duality, which makes it a fitting metaphor for the fact that pleasure and pain, life and death, exist in the same one-and-only world. But as Magritte’s reminds us, we tend to be in a state of knowing and not knowing simultaneously, we turn a blind eye, so to speak. Magritte’s insertion into his painting of a very visible dagger was obviously intended to make us apprehend what we usually don’t consciously see because we prefer not to acknowledge its implications. 

Here are some more paintings by Magritte that feature roses:

A Rose a Day No. 4

The work shown here is the frontispiece of the Elizabethan magus Robert Fludd’s Summum Bonum (1629). It shows a single seven-petaled rose, designed like a medieval heraldic emblem, being pollinated by bees. Above, is written the Latin text: ‘Dat Rosa Mel Apibus’ – ‘The Rose Gives The Bees Honey’. The stem of the rose is also cruciform in shape. The seven petaled rose bloom symbolizes the solar wheel, the Rosa Mundi, and the number seven is sacred to alchemy, representing the path taken by the seeker after gnostic wisdom. The journey can be dangerous – thorny – but the final goal is sweet. like honey to the bee. 

The occult traditions shared a fundamental concept: the macrocosm-microcosm. Close but hidden harmonies were understood to exist between the ‘large-scale’ (macro) cosmos and the small-scale ‘little’ (micro) world of humanity, which when brought into correct alignment by an initiate who was inspired by true love of Theo-Sophia, made possible not only psychic but also seemingly ‘miraculous’ physical transformations. Belief in a correspondence between the macro- and microcosmic dimensions were therefore more than simply symbolic; they had transformational potential for those who knew how to bring the them into alignment. For example, the planets were believed to be in correspondence with specific animals and plants, and the human psyche. Therefore, assessing the alignment of the planets was important for spiritual and physical well-being. 

In the alchemical tradition it was believed that when the alchemist successfully established the correct inner-and outer-alignments it was possible to transmute base metal into gold. Important alchemical treatises included works with titles like The Rosary of the Philosophers and the Rosarium, which drew on the well-established convention of describing a treatise in floral terms, as well as the tradition of describing Mary as the ‘Rosa Mystica’, and prayers as roses or rosaries, envisaging the alchemical art as a rose garden, a metaphor borrowed from the Catholic tradition of likening Mary to a rose-garden.  Only those in possession of the ‘key’ could enter this secret realm. A key alchemical symbol was that of the pollination of the rose by the bee, which, allegorically speaking, stood for the lovers of Theo-Sophia streaming by from all directions to gather the truth.

The conjunction of a red rose and a wooden cross was understood in alchemical terms as the "female" rose being attached to the "male" cross. On another level of alchemical allegory, however, the rose and cross represent intellectual, spiritual, and eternal beauty being ‘crucified’ upon the cross of the suffering world, the fallen state the initiate hopes to transcend and purify.

This etching is from the Rosarium also features roses,  and is a visual allegory of the vital moment in the ‘Great Work’. The masculine spiritual energy is symbolized by the king standing on the sun, and the feminine soul energy of the bride stands atop the moon. They are brought into correspondence through the intertwining of rose branches, assisted by a dove, symbolizing the Holy Ghost, who reconciles the two opposing elements by adding a third rose branch. The union between sol and luna, male and female, is known as the coniunctio or The Chymical Wedding, and signals the transcending of the physical world and entrance into the spiritual. In some alchemical treatises, the red and white rose symbolize the male and female polarities, or the solar and lunar influences over the animal and vegetal world.  

The psychologist Carl Jung endeavored to comprehend the often bizarre seeming allegories of the esoteric mystical tradition in terms that were understandable to the modern mind. For Jung, alchemy was above all a way of visualizing the quest for physical, emotional, and cognitive individuation. He saw its bizarre symbolism not simply as illusions or fantasies but as mental projections corresponding to the modern psychology of the unconscious. Alchemists, Jung believed, had projected onto the realm of chemical change the same life-processes evident in the dream-worlds of his patients, and he saw their allegories as pre-modern attempts to describe the perennial struggle of the psyche to achieve total integration of the unconscious background to existence, which Jung called the process of ‘individuation’. Jung specifically studied the alchemical treatise the Rosarium from the perspective of his analytical psychology, and argued that this alchemical work symbolised the archetype of ‘relationship’. He pointed out that there is an inherent affinity between opposites, and that if they can be synthesized, they become more than just a bolted-on combination of parts. The image I discussed earlier of the marriage of Sol and Luna, with its intertwined rose branches, represented for Jung the integration of the animus and anima, the male and female aspects of the human psyche, which, if achieved, permits the psyche to achieve a deeper, more holistic, level of experience.

A Rose a Day No. 3

The cover of the iconic hippy band Grateful Dead’s second album, released in 1971, shows a drawing of a skull garlanded with red roses, which was lifted and adapted from an illustration in an early translation of the Sufi classic, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 'I've got this one spirit that's laying roses on me’, said band member and lyricist Robert Hunter. ‘Roses, roses, can't get enough of those bloody roses. There is no better allegory for life, dare I say it, than roses."

Grateful Dead’s lyrics often include references to the rose, most famously in the song ‘It Must Have Been the Roses’, which begins: ‘Annie laid her head down in the roses. / She had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons, in her long brown hair. / I don't know, maybe it was the roses, / All I know I could not leave her there.’ Annie, it seems, is dead. Another album is called ‘American Beauty’, and features cover art of the eponymous red rose (of which, more later on). Their 1991 compilation live album is called ‘Infrared Roses’. There’s a Grateful Dead gig poster of a blue rose (see below) which you can buy on-line. The Dead seem to dwell on the connection between the rose and death, a theme to which I will return in relation to future images of roses.

The album cover featuring the roses and skull was going to be called ‘Skull Fuck’, but for obvious reasons the band’s record company vetoed the title, so the album went title-less. ‘Skull fucking’, by the way, was Hippy slang for ‘blowing your mind’. But as Bob Dylan sang in the early 1960s, ‘The times they are a-changin’, and the on-line Urban Dictionary informs me that nowadays ‘skull fuck’ means, ‘the act of grabbing a partner's skull and putting your dick in their mouth, grabbing their skull and holding it still, therefore having sex with their skull.’ 

 Here’s some more pictures with roses for all you ‘Deadheads’:

A Rose a Day. No.2

The White Garden, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, UK.

While the world was falling for new-fangled Hybrid Tea and Floribunda roses, some rosarians were less than enamoured of their brazenly modern attributes and the kind of garden aesthetic they encouraged, and in the 1930s the British rose-breeder Edward Bunyard inspired Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson to introduce old roses into her garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.

Of course, taste in gardens is mostly subjective, and Sissinghurst Castle is one of my favorites, perhaps mainly because it’s not so far from where I grew up on the Sussex coast so I’ve visited more than once.  The garden is based on the concept of axial walks opening onto enclosed gardens, or "garden rooms".  in the Foreword to her Some Flowers (1937) Vita Sackville-West down a challenge which at the time must have stung many British gardeners:

This country is a country of garden-lovers, and it contains many who, getting perhaps a little bored with growing exactly the same things as their neighbours year after year, look round for a few extras which shall come well within the scope of their purse, time, and knowledge. We can all grow wallflowers, lupins, delphiniums or snapdragons. Far be it from me to run down any of these valuable allies, but the moment always comes when the taste of every true flower-lover turns also towards something less usual and obvious. 

Sissinghurst’s garden is deliberately crammed to the bursting point with plants, but it never quite collapses into chaos. As I mentioned, old garden roses were central to Sackville-West and Nicolson’s vision, and there is a dedicated area for them. They believed the garden’s setting, beside a medieval castle, as Sackville-West wrote, ‘lent itself kindly to their [roses’] untidy, lavish habit; there was space a plenty, with the walls to frame their exuberance’. The intention was therefore to arrange things so that ‘roses may be found growing in a jungle, sprawling, intertwining, barely tamed and foaming in an unorthodox way’. By 1953, there were almost 200 different old garden roses at Sissinghurst, including ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’, ‘Complicata’, ‘Camaieux’, ‘Charles de Mills’, ‘Belle de Crécy’, ‘Variegata di Bologna’, and ‘Paul Ricault’.

In Some Flowers, Sackville-West discusses 5 roses, all ‘old’: ‘Tuscany’, Rosa moyesii (a native of China that at that time was rare in England), Rosa centifolia nuscosa (the Moss Rose), and Rosa mundi. ‘Tuscany’, a very dark red Gallica Rose, which is also known as the Velvet Rose. Of this rose Sackville-West wrote:

What combination of words! One almost suffocates in their soft depths, as though one sank into a bed of rose-petals, all thorns ideally stripped away. We cannot actually lie on a bed of roses, unless we are decadent and also very rich, but metaphorically we can imagine ourselves doing so when we hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it in an intimate way into our private heart. This sounds a fanciful way of writing, the sort of way which makes me shut up most gardening books with a bang, but in this case I am trying to get as close to my true meaning as possible. It really does teach one something, to look long and closely at a rose, especially such a rose as Tuscany, which opens flat (being semi-double) thus revealing the quivering and dusty gold of its central perfection.

Sackville-West doesn’t mention Sissinghurst’s most famous feature, the White Garden, in Some Flowers for the simple reason that it wasn’t until the 1950s that she began to plant it into existence. The idea was that only white, green, grey and silver were to grow there. By choosing a pale palette, Sackville-West was uniting flora that usually do not find themselves neighbours, and pride of place is a white species rose, the climberRosa mulliganii. But the rose I remember best at Sissinghurst is the one growing on the south face of the South Cottage, which you can see in the photograph – the Noisette climber ‘Mme. Alfred Carriére’ – which, asI later discovered, is the very first rose Sackville-West planted in the garden after she purchased the property. Inspired by this encounter, I planted my own ‘Mme. Alfred Carriére’, which today climbs up the east facing wall (it can tolerate shade)of our house in France. We’ve nicknamed it the ‘Curious Rose’, because it is so prolific it keeps reaching high enough to conceal the view out our back window, obliging us to prune it back on a regular basis.

A Rose a Day. No.1

This week my book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ is published in the UK by Oneworld. In the USA it’s published in November. So, every day for the next few weeks I will post a picture of a rose. You will discover that they are surprisingly various. I will also post the same image on my Instagram page : morleypsimon. But in this blog I will write a bit of information about the image to contextualize it.

So, here is today’s picture:

Jean-Marc Nattier, ‘Manon Balletti’ (1757), oil on canvas, 54x47cm. National Gallery, London.

Manon is wearing a ‘hundred-petalled’ rose, the Centifolia, Rosa centifolia, at the centre of her bodice as a ‘bosom flower’. Rosa centifolia was also known as the Cabbage Rose because the manner in which the petals interweave and their great number resembles a cabbage. The plant is shrubby with long drooping canes, and before the nineteenth century it was unique in having this round, globular flower comprised of numerous densely-overlapping petals. As you can see, the petals are usually pink, but sometimes they are white or dark purplish-red.

Rosa centfilia is a ‘sport’ - a chance mutation - and Rosa gallica, Rosa moschata, Rosa canina, and Rosa damascena were all participants in its parenting at some unspecfiable time and place. So, it can claim to be the most truly communally European rose, although conception occurred somewhere in the Near East. This rose also went by the aliases Holland Rose (on account of it being first cultivated in Europe by the Dutch), Provence Rose, and Rose de Mai. Why ‘Provence’? Because it was (and is still) grown in great numbers in the south of France for the perfume industry, especially around Grasse.

When I visited John Lewis department store on Oxford Street in London, on a rose hunt, I tried the then new Eau de Toilette ‘Rose N’Roses’ by Dior, which had been recently launched to coincide with Valentine’s Day, 2020, joining the six other Miss Dior rose-based perfumes (the first appeared in 1947). I asked the two sales’ assistants what specific type of rose was used for the perfume, and one of them replied, ‘the Grass Rose’, which threw me for a moment, until I realized she was referring to the Grasse Rose, that is, Rosa centifolia.  In the twelfth century, returning Crusaders may have carried knowledge of rose distillation back with them to Western Europe, although such knowledge could have arisen independently in Europe. Eventually, this rose became important ingredient for the Western perfume industry, and  Rosa centifolia remains today at the heart of a thriving business. Dior, Chanel, and Hermès all source their roses in Grasse. By the way, at John Lewis I also found a lovely red polyester Rosa centifolia, retailing at a very reasonable £8.00.

In a letter from May 1888, Vincent van Gogh, who had recently arrived in Arles, wrote of the painter Auguste Renoir to his brother Theo: ‘You will remember that we saw a magnificent garden of roses by Renoir. I was expecting to find subjects like that here….You would probably have to go to Nice to find Renoir’s garden again. I have seen very few roses here, though there are some, among them the big red roses called Rose de Provence.’ As a Dutchman, van Gogh would no doubt have been delighted to learn that the Rose de Provence is actually a ‘sport’ first nurtured in Europe by Dutch breeders. 

Here is what the National Gallery website says about this painting:

Maria Maddalena Balletti, known as Manon Balletti, was the daughter of Antonio Giuseppe Balletti, an actor in the Comédie Italienne. In contrast to her parents, aunt and brothers, who were successful actors and ballet masters, Manon appears not to have taken to the stage professionally, although she performed in amateur dramatics and was a keen amateur musician. Her brother Stefano was friends with the Venetian adventurer and author Giacomo Casanova.

By the age of 17 Manon was engaged to her music teacher, Charles-Francois Clément, who arranged music for the Comédie Italienne. When Casanova returned to Paris from Venice in January 1757, he and Manon fell in love. Manon broke off her engagement to Clément, which left Casanova in rather a bind as he had no intention of marrying her himself. After a three-year on-off courtship, during which Casanova promised Manon’s mother on her deathbed that he would marry her daughter, the pair were still no closer to being wed and Casanova was involved with ladies elsewhere. Finally, in 1760, Manon wrote to Casanova to tell him that she had married M. Blondel, the king’s architect. A widower and father of two children, Blondel was 35 years older than Manon. After her three-year giddy courtship with Casanova, Blondel must have appeared to Manon and her family as the essence of dependability.

Manon asked Casanova to return her portrait, and he obliged, although he never returned her letters. We know that the portrait Casanova returned was a miniature so it cannot be this pastel portrait by Nattier. Nevertheless, it is tempting to suppose that Casanova may have commissioned it as he knew Nattier. According to Casanova, the artist was among the few portraitists who could produce a perfect likeness while at the same time adding an imperceptible beauty to the face.

Manon wears two violas in her hair or attached to her veil, which was a fashion introduced by Mme de Pompadour (official chief mistress of Louis XV) in the mid 1740s. In the language of flowers, violas or pansies (pensées in French) mean ‘thoughts of the beloved’. The rose on Manon’s breast is associated with love. It may also refer to her mother’s name: Rosa. The portrait is signed and dated 1757 and it may have been one of the eight family portraits in gilded wood frames recorded in Manon Balletti’s room in 1758.

There are also a number of other portraits of women by Nattier that closely resemble this one. There is a virtually identical portrait of Mlle Marsollier (sold at Sotheby’s New York, 28 January 1999), the main difference being a bow rather than a rose in the corsage. The essence of the composition, with eyes looking directly at the viewer, a striped muslin veil attached to a point near the crown of the head and draped over the shoulder of a monochrome dress decorated with one or more strings of pearls had been adopted by Nattier in his half-length portrait of Madame Dupleix de Bacquencourt, née Jeanne-Henriette de Lalleu (private collection) and then used again with variations for numerous subsequent portraits. Repetition allowed him to produce portraits more quickly and more cheaply than constantly inventing new compositions.

[i] Bumpus, J., Van Gogh’s Flowers (London: Phaidon, 1989), unpaginated, quoted with Plate 23.