A Rose a Day No. 40
This is a work by the contemporary Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b.1958), entitled A Flor de Piel (2014).
The artist and her team stitched together hundreds of deep red rose petals, each of which has been chemically treated to preserve their dark hue and pliant texture within a huge canopy which is intended to lie creased and pleated on the floor.
A flor de piel is a Spanish idiomatic expression meaning ‘on the surface of the skin’, used to describe extreme emotions that are beyond words, and the work was inspired by a Colombian nurse who, after providing care to injured parties on both sides of Colombia’s protracted civil, was kidnapped and tortured to death. Salcedo has found a powerful analogy for the eruption onto the skin’s surface, but of the transfiguring of the suffering through the ethereal beauty of the rose petal cloak.
By linking the blood red rose petals to the human skin and to a contemporary context of political anarchy and systemic violence, Salcedo has also succeeded in instilling new and unsettling life into the age-old comparison that likens a woman’s skin to a rose petal.
Image Source: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/31379
A Rose a Day No.39
I’m not sure what to say about this picture.
I spotted the display outside a café in Paju Book City, near where my partner Eungbok has her office and showroom. The café seeks to be ‘Antique’, and the inside it is full of fake classical paintings and tapestries, various ornaments, and faux antique tables and chairs. They do an excellent expresso.
A Rose a Day No.38
Vincent van Gogh, ‘Roses’ (1890).
Source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436534
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.’ Van Gogh is referring to Rosa centifolia, the Centifolia or Cabbage Rose, which were especially grown in Provence in the region around Grasse as a cash-crop. 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.
One year after the letter quoted, and now a voluntarily resident of the mental asylum in Saint-Rémy, van Gogh was more successful. Referring to the painting entitled ‘Roses’ (1890) which is shown above he wrote to Theo in May 1890: ‘I've just finished this canvas of pink roses against a yellow-green background in a green vase’, and he concludes the letter by announcing: ‘I feel absolutely serene, and the brushstrokes come to me and follow each other very logically.’
Unfortunately, the bold colours van Gogh applied have faded considerably, so that, for example, the bright red of the Damask Rose buds have become flesh-like, and the overall visual impact of seeing the ‘complementary colour’ contrast of red against the green background has been greatly reduced.
A Rose a Day No.37
The is an illumination from the medieval Tacuinum of Vienna (c.1407), a medical handbook. It shows red and white flowers being plucked by two handmaids from the same rose-tree and handing them to their lady who is seated on the left, and who cradles several blooms in her lap, and wears a rose garland on her head.
The rose is listed as useful in the treatment of ‘inflamed brains’. But it warns: ‘In some persons they cause a feeling of heaviness and constriction, or blockage of the sense of smell.’ The positive effects of the rose are described as follows: ‘They are good for warm temperaments, for the young, in warm seasons, and in warm regions.’ The compilers of the Christian Tacuinus absorbed medical knowledge inherited from Greece and Rome, but much was culled from Arabic botanical and medical treatises. The Tacuinum of Vienna refers specifically to the Damask Rose, and is clearly repeating verbatim the advice of Arab treatises. Drawing on ancient Greek texts, the Persian Ibn-Sînâ, or Avicenna as he is known in the West, stated in The Canon of Medicine (1025) that distilled rose-water was beneficial in cases of fainting and rapid heartbeats, and can strengthen the brain by enhancing memory. Boiling rose-water and exposing the rose bud to its steam, he wrote, is especially beneficial for eye diseases. The best roses, says the Tacuinum of Vienna, come from Suri in Persia. Trade along the ‘Silk Road’ and via ports such as Venice made Syrian and Persian rose-water and rose oil available in Western Europe – at a price.
A Rose a Day No.36
This rose probably doesn’t look so different from the one’s growing in your garden on the local park. But in fact, it is a very, very important rose. It’s the first in the family of roses we mostly live with today: the Hybrid Teas.
It is called ‘La France’ and was presented to the world by the breeder Jean-Baptiste André Guillot, known as Guillot fils in 1867.
‘La France’ was the glorious culmination of the collective efforts of European botanists and breeders over the previous fifty years to marry the best of the east with the best of the west. Somewhat immodestly, Guillot fils proudly named the new rose ‘La France’. It is pale silvery pink in colour, has globular double blooms, and grows to around 4-5 feet tall in a tight shrub-like structure. But for us, unlike for Guillot fils contemporaries, looking at a specimen of ‘La France’ will seem a familiar and not especially extraordinary experience because ‘La France’ possesses most of the characteristics we routinely associate with the typical garden roses of today.
Guillot fils conscientiously built on the success of a family of recent rose mutations called the Hybrid Perpetuals. These 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.
But it wouldn’t be until the 1880s that the number of roses with similar hybrid ancestry and characteristics were numerous enough to warrant the naming of a whole new class, and it was an Englishman who was to see the real potential of roses like ‘La France.’ In the 1870s Henry Bennett began to breed what he termed ‘Pedigree Hybrids of the Tea Rose’, and in 1879 put in commerce ten of them at the same time.
The rose would never be the same again. As the authors of the Encyclopedia of Roses write succinctly: ‘Henry Bennett invented modern roses, the Hybrid Teas that flowered repeatedly, not as delicate glasshouse treasures, but as hardly garden plants. There is scarcely a rose in our gardens today that does not descend from Hybrid Teas of the Wiltshire “wizard”.
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.34
A tattoo of a rose wrapped around a cross. What are the origins of this fashionable ‘Goth’ symbol?
In alchemy the conjunction of a red rose and a wooden cross was understood to being together the "female" rose and the "male" cross. But the rose and the cross was especially important for the secret society known as Rosicrucianism, which was founded in the seventeenth century to study alchemy, Hermeticism, Cabala and Christian mysticism, and to merge them with the proto-scientific and humanist quest for deeper knowledge of the workings of the cosmos and advocacy of radical political reform of society. But even today, no one seems entirely sure why the Rosicrucians choose the title ‘rose’ and ‘cross’, but it probably derives from Christian Rosencreutz (‘Rose Cross’) the legendary figure at the centre of the so-called ‘Rosicrucian manifestos’ published in the second decade of the seventeenth century In fact, the ‘Ros’ in ‘Rosicrucian’ may not be referring to a plant at all, because in alchemy, the Latin ‘ros’ (dew) was also a very significant symbol.
Incidentally, Rosicrucians is still alive and well. There’s an informative website, and ‘Lodges’ in most major cities, including London, where is is housed in a former Nonconformist chapel in Peckham.
But in the eighteenth century the mystical Hermetic and alchemical traditions which underpin Rosicrucianism came under increasingly devastating attack from the nascent scientific thinking that became fundamental to the Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason’, and subsequently to the entire modern age. Now, there was no place for the arcane pretensions of alchemists, Occultists or Rosicrucians. The scientific method rejected the ‘macrocosm-microcosm’ principal, replacing it by the system upon which today’s chemistry, physics, and biology are founded. This was a new worldview that proceeded based on the very different analogy in which the secrets of nature are understood according to the model of mechanism, and whose workings were reduced to mathematics. The seventeenth century philosopher had René Descartes argued that the only valid truth was that revealed through ‘clear and distinct thought’, which proceeds in a logical manner. This effectively overturned the pre-modern belief that if human reason is properly exercised, it grants spiritual or otherworldly illumination, and magical powers to transform reality. The ‘magician’ sought domination through drawing the world into the darkness of his own subjectivity, while the scientist externalized their subjectivity within the luminous world, dominating it through depersonalization. The mystical-occult insight into the macrocosm-microcosm was superseded by the abstract logical system of the modern scientist, which quickly reaped many benefits, especially in relation to medicine and technological innovation.
But the seemingly soulless society that the scientific worldview brought into existence under the sign of the mechanical analogy, quickly provoked a reaction, and as the nineteenth century unfolded, visionaries, thinkers, and artists emerged who hoped to strengthen the deep currents in Western mysticism and spirituality through the absorption of Eastern philosophical and religious traditions which were becoming increasingly known through the translation in Western languages of Buddhist and Hindu texts. Once again, the mystical rose would play its part.
In France there was a briefly influential revival of Rosicrucianism, and in final decades of the century the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Cross was founded by Joséphin Péladin and his fellow initiates. Péladin was a well-known literary figure and dandy, who promenaded around Montmartre dressed as a monk. He was also a fervent Roman Catholic, and soon broke with his colleagues to found l’Ordre de la Rose Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal, in which he aimed to connect occult beliefs with the Church and also with the arts. Péladin organized several exhibitions of art called Salons de la Rose-Croix, declaring: ‘The artist should be a knight in armour, eagerly engaged in the symbolic quest for the Holy Grail, a crusader waging perpetual war on the bourgeoisie!’
In Britain, the Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn was founded around the same time. This too proved briefly influential beyond the narrow confines of those uniquely interested in occult philosophy, such as the poet Swinburne and the writer Oscar Wilde. The Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yates was an especially committed member of the Golden Dawn. Members wore a rose on a ‘rood’ – or cross – as a pendant to symbolize the ‘female’ rose of intellectual, spiritual, eternal beauty united with the ‘male’ cross of worldly suffering. The symbol was intended to be a talisman to remind initiates to strive to overcome the material world in their quest for spiritual transcendence. In ‘The Rose upon the Rood of Time’, Yeats wrote: ‘Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! / Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways.’
In the early twentieth century, the German philosopher Rudolf Steiner founded Anthroposophy, another attempt to merge western humanistic science with Eastern and pre-modern European religion and philosophy. As Steiner described it, initiation into secret mystical knowledge must be as rigorous as any scientific experiment, and in his teachings, he described what he called the ‘Rose Cross Meditation’, which drew on the Hermetic and alchemical tradition. An initiate is invited to consider the red petals of the rose as analogous to human blood in a purified state, that is, after the destructive aspects of the human passions have died away. Next, the initiate mediates on a wooden cross symbolizing what is left behind when the passions die. Following that, the initiate visualizes seven red roses of purified, transformed blood forming a wreath around the wooden cross. This is now a composite image of a rose-cross, representing the victory of the higher, purified nature of the self over the lower animal dimension.
But I’m not sure how much knowledge of such recondite historical context and spiritual profundity lay behind the decision by the person to have the tattoo in the photograph. This is what Wikipedia says about contemporary Goth fashion styling:
Gothic fashion is marked by conspicuously dark, antiquated and homogeneous features. It is stereotyped as eerie, mysterious, complex and exotic. A dark, sometimes morbid fashion and style of dress, typical gothic fashion includes black hair and black period-styled clothing. Both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner and dark fingernail polish, most especially black. Styles are often borrowed from punk fashion and—more currently—from the Victorian and Elizabethan periods. It also frequently expresses pagan, occult or other religious imagery. Gothic fashion and styling may also feature silver jewelry and piercings [and tattoos].
……..
The New York Times noted: "The costumes and ornaments are a glamorous cover for the genre's somber themes. In the world of Goth, nature itself lurks as a malign protagonist, causing flesh to rot, rivers to flood, monuments to crumble and women to turn into slatterns, their hair streaming and lipstick askew".
A Rose a Day No. 33
This is my final post to celebrate the publication of my new book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’. It is a picture of ‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’, and we used it as the cover image of the book.
To the Chinaman who painted 'Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’ this rose would have been known as ‘Dan Huang Xian Shui’ - ‘Light Yellow Sweet Water Rose’.
The painting comes from one of the most interesting collections of botanical art from China, which was amassed in the early nineteenth century by the Englishman John Reeves, an East India Company tea inspector and amateur botanist. Reeves was stationed in China with the Company prior to the First Opium War (1839-42), and collected plants in and around Canton in his spare time, and was often frustrated by having to use Chinese gardeners as go-between due to the restrictions imposed on foreigners. He had the capital idea of hiring Chinese artists to paint what he did get his hands on, and in all, Reeves amassed over 800 pictures. Only 16 are roses, but they include this wonderful one.
Interestingly, the painting shows a specimen entirely without prickles. The rigours of botanical art must have appealed to the anonymous Chinese artist-artisans who were already accustomed to working in water-based paints on paper, and so could adapt easily to accurate linear outline and the suppression of a plausibly three-dimensional contextual location. Such characteristics, unusual outside botanical painting in the West, were already an inherent part of the rich flower painting genre within the Chinese tradition. An interesting feature of the paintings is that they often show decomposition as well as juvenescence and maturity – for example, decayed and broken leaves. Such features are absent from Redouté’s work. Perhaps the Chinese artists, taking to heart Reeve’s requirement of empirical accuracy, considered it useful to show a greater part of the plant’s lifecycle. Anyway, it was on the strength of the painting that the Horticultural Society of London to have the rose sent westwards.
The original paintings from Reeves collection are in the Royal Horticultural Society, and when I examined them I was struck by the fact that they were made on two kinds of paper – the more prestigious were on specially prepared watercolour paper from England, the smaller ones on traditional Chinese paper. The former paper was intended to be robust enough to survive the humid climatic conditions in China, and a long ocean voyage, but today these papers are discoloured, foxed, and showing signs of atmospheric pollution, while the local product has survived almost pristine into the twenty-first century.
‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’, discovered - or at least, ‘discovered’ by a Westerner - by John Damper Parks in 1824. It is a repeat bloomer, has a vigorous growth habit, bright green leaves, and very large double or semi-double flowers with an average diameter of 4 inches, which have the unusual characteristic of being straw or sulphur yellow in colour. The petals are thick and mildly scented – ‘tea scented’. But the consensus is that although this rose is officially still commercially available it actually disappeared 100 years ago.
‘Parks’ Yellow Tea-Scented China’ became on the four ‘studs’ that between 1792 and 1824 were picked with the specific intention of crossing them with Western homegrown varieties. Together, the resulting mutations caused the enormous changes in the range and characteristics of the rose’s gene pool.
The other three ‘studs’ are: ‘Parsons’ Pink Rose’, ‘Slater’s Crimson’, ‘Hume’s Blush Tea-Scented China’ . Along with a few other native roses, these China and Tea Roses made possible most of the transformations that characterize the rose plant we know today: a bush-like, robust, garden plant with a wide variety of coloured flowers that are large, semi-double, high-centred, and bloom continuously from May to late autumn.
A Rose a Day No.32
The erotic ambiance created by roses is definitely theme of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’ (1864-68).
"Verticordia" means ‘who changes hearts’, and the theme of the redemptive power of sexual love is given an explicit pictorial treatment. A lustrous, red-headed woman is shown bare-breasted and surrounded by flowers – Centifolia Roses behind her and honeysuckle in front. She holds Cupid’s arrow in her right hand, and an apple – symbol of temptation, but also of the judgement of Paris - in the other. Yellow butterflies, symbol of hope and guidance and of the soul, perch on the apple and arrow, and bedeck her halo. But it is the powerful reds of the flowers that make the biggest impression. In the popular ‘language of flowers’ of the period, the honeysuckle usually symbolized devoted love. Apparently, Rossetti spent a large amount of money to get his Centifolia roses, refreshing his collection regularly with new blossoms, as he painstakingly painted them. The air must have been extremely fragrant, as honeysuckle and Centifolia are both especially noted for their powerful scents, which also adds an invisible dimension of sensual allure to the painting. Venus is a woman of considerable and threatening power.
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.30
This is a detail of Paolo Uccello’s masterpiece, ‘The Battle of San Romano’ (1438-40) in the National Gallery. London. A long time ago I used to do guided tours for the NG, and often talked about this huge painting. But I never noticed the roses. Can you see them? Behind the knights there’s a thick hedge of Gallica Roses (the pink ones) and Alba Roses (the white).
This is the whole paintings:
The Gallica rose was the most familiar rose in this period.
It had been around in Western Europe since the Romans. Rosa gallica officinalis, had several aliases merely in the English language: Apothecary Rose (officialis means apothecary, which indicates it was cultivated for medicinal purposes), ‘Gallic Rose’, ‘French Rose’, or ‘Rose of Provins’, are other names that indicate the close association with France, and in particular with the town of Provins, where they were cultivated as a cash-crop.
In Roses for English Gardens (1902), the gardening expert Gertrude Jekyll, the most important advocate of the rose to the late Victorians and Edwardians, says this about the Gallica Rose:
Of the old Provins Roses (R. gallica) there are a number of catalogued varieties. They are mostly striped or splashed with rosy and purplish colour. I have grown them nearly all, but though certainly pretty things, they are of less value in the garden than the striped Damask Rosa Mundi. But there is an old garden Rose, the Blush gallica, much more double, and that grows into very strong bushes, that is a good Rose for all gardens. It will put up with any treatment. I have it on the top of a dry wall where it tumbles over in the prettiest way and blooms even more freely than the bushes on the level
There are two other paintings by Uccello of the same battle, now in the Uffizi and the Louvre. They do not include any roses:
A Rose a Day No.29
As is well known, Pablo Picasso had a Rose Period (1904-1906), which followed on from a Blue Period. These were essentially his ‘farewell’ to sentimental Symbolism, before he began the arduous journey toward Cubism. Not surprisingly, some of his Rose Period paintings include roses, such as this one from 1905, entitled ‘Boy with a Pipe’. He is wearing what look like Damask roses as a head garland, and behind him (on wallpaper?) are flower bouquets including roses.
In 2004, ‘Boy with a Pipe’ fetched a record $104 million at auction at Sotheby’s, at that time the most expensive painting ever sold. It was observed the work’s popularity was a reflection of the fact that the Rose Period is one of Picasso’s ‘happiest’.
Here are a couple more Rose Period works with (maybe) roses:
Pablo Picasso, 1905, Acrobate et jeune Arlequin (Acrobat and Young Harlequin), oil on canvas, 191.1 x 108.6 cm, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
Pablo Picasso, 1905, Maternité(Mother and Child), private collection
I grew up looking at this painting, as my father, somewhat bizarrely, asked for it as a wedding present, and it was prominently displayed in our ‘Sitting Room’. It wasn’t just a print, either, but a hand-painted copy in a fancy frame. But is it a rose in the mother’s hair? No. It’s more likely a carnation, as this was the traditional choice in the Spanish flamenco tradition which Picasso evokes.
On occasion, artists can be privileged with a rose named in their memory. There is one called ‘Picasso’ marketed in 1966, whose flowers give the impression of each having been individually hand coloured:
This has become part of the burgeoning and lucrative Picasso franchise that also includes a brand of automobile. As you can see, ‘Picasso’ is indeed a pink rose, but rather too deep a shade to evoke his ‘Rose Period.’
The idea of ‘hand painted’ petals has been fully exploited by the French nursery, Delbard, mentioned earlier, who markets a line called ‘Roses des Peintres’ – painters’ roses – including a creamy white and pink bi-colour rose called ‘Claude Monet’ (1992), and another called ‘Henri Matisse’ (1995), who’s petals suggest they have been painted with crimson and pink splashes. This is ‘Claude Monet’:
A Rose a Day No. 28
The inside covers of my book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’, designed by Chang Eungbok. She used Redouté’s botanical paintings as a source.
Chang is a Korean designer with her own company, Mono Collection. She’s also my partner!
Her business website is: www.monocollection.com
Her instagram is: monocollection
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.25
This amazing display of plastic roses was spotted today in Dosan Park in Gangnam, Seoul, a very affluent part of the city, and decorates the facade of the Alex Muller Dessert Cafe.
A Rose a Day No.24
This is an oil painting by the French artist Henri Fantin-Latour entitled ‘A Basket of Roses’, and it was painted in 1890. It’s in the National Gallery, London.
Fantin-Latour imbues his floral still-lifes with an animation that makes them seem invested with life. As a result, however, it becomes difficult to identify which specific roses he depicts, although it is certainly still possible, and I can with some confidence identify Centifolias, Tea Roses, Noisette, and what looks like a Hybrid Perpetual or Hybrid Tea.
There is a wonderful pink rose called ‘Fantin-Latour’. But it in fact has nothing directly to do with the artist, and turned up as a seedling in an English garden in the mid-twentieth century. As the Encyclopedia of Roses remarks: ‘Although often classed among the Centifolias, it is clearly a modern hybrid, a prototype of David Austin’s English Roses.’ (146) I have a specimen in my garden in France. It’s a robust shrub, with blousy blush-pink and fragrant blooms and nice dark leaves, but it only blossoms once in the early summer. Peter Beales is very keen on it: ‘When seen at its best, this rose will convince even the most ardent rejectors of non-remontant roses that it should be growing in their garden, for it is one of the most beautiful of shrubs.’
Here is it:
Interestingly, the celebrated graphic designer Pete Saville borrowed a reproduction of Fantin-Latour’s painting for the cover of the electronica band New Order’s album Power, Corruption and Lies (1983). As he later explained, but with what is surely an excess of cynicism: “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives.”
Here is the album cover:
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:
