Rose

The rose is one of the small number of plant attributions that is genuinely classical rather than Renaissance. It is Venus's flower in Greek and Roman literature centuries before any planetary herbal existed.

The mythological accounts vary, which is itself informative: the rose springs from the blood of the wounded Adonis, or from Aphrodite's own blood as she runs through thorns to reach him, or from the foam of her sea-birth, or it is stained red by her blood from white. Multiple incompatible origin stories for the same association are a sign of a cult fact looking for a narrative, not of a narrative generating a cult fact. Roses were used in Aphrodite's worship and at Roman festivals; the Rosalia was a genuine calendar observance of decorating the dead with roses.

Culpeper repeats the attribution and specifies the red and damask roses. He is not the source and does not claim to be.

The rose then acquired a second, competing symbolic career in Christian usage, as the flower of the Virgin. The rosary takes its name from a garland of roses, the enclosed rose garden of the hortus conclusus is a Marian image, and the rose window is a standing feature of Gothic architecture. This is a deliberate reassignment of a pagan symbol rather than an accident, and the two readings, erotic and virginal, sit on the same flower throughout medieval European art, sometimes in the same picture.

Sub rosa, under the rose, meaning in confidence, is Roman: a rose hung above a table marked what was said beneath it as not to be repeated.

The rose of florists is a heavily engineered object and bears limited resemblance to the plant the classical world knew.

Rosa is a genus of roughly 150 species of prickly shrubs in the Rosaceae, the family that also contains apples, pears, plums, cherries, almonds, strawberries and hawthorn. The wild rose has five petals. The many-petalled bloom is the result of a mutation converting stamens into petals, selected for and multiplied by cultivation; a fully double rose is a partially sterile flower.

The prickles are not thorns in the botanical sense. A thorn is a modified shoot and a spine a modified leaf; a rose's are prickles, outgrowths of the epidermis, which is why they snap off cleanly without tearing the wood.

The fruit is the hip, a fleshy receptacle enclosing the true fruits. Rose hips are unusually high in vitamin C, and this is not folklore: rose hip syrup was collected and distributed as a national programme in wartime Britain when citrus imports failed, and the scheme is documented in government records.

The scent chemistry is genuinely complex: hundreds of volatiles, dominated by compounds including geraniol, citronellol and the rose oxides, plus beta-damascenone, which is present in vanishingly small amounts and contributes disproportionately. Attar of roses requires an enormous mass of petals for a small yield, which is why it has always been expensive, and the main production centres are the Bulgarian Rose Valley and Isparta in Turkey. Most rose scent sold is synthetic, and most modern florist roses have had their scent bred out in favour of vase life.