Michael V Marriott - RHS Roses: An Inspirational Guide to Choosing and Growing the Best Roses

Roses in Bud and Bloom with Butterflies and Insects

This artwork, part of the Chinese School, is thought to have been painted in the 18th century.

The Greeks and Romans used roses in their cooking and cosmetics, which means they must have grown them on a fairly large scale. But roses also played an important part in their ornamental gardens: Pliny the Younger, describing a garden in a letter, wrote, a visitor on entering would look over the rose garden, whose scent would reach him. They used roses enthusiastically for their various festivals, celebrations, and banquets. The rose was associated with Venus (and, hence, with sex) as well as excess. At Cleopatras first meeting with Mark Antony, a layer of roses a cubit (half a yard/meter) deep covered the floor and others hung from the ceiling in festoons. There is also the perhaps apocryphal story that at a banquet given by the third-century Roman emperor Heliogabalus, so many roses were dropped from the ceiling that some people drowned.

Over time, the rose transformed from a pagan symbol, with unsavory and decadent connotations in Greek and Roman life, to one that was central to both Christianity and Islam. It became a symbol for the Virgin Mary, who was described by the fifth-century poet Sedulius as the rose among thorns. Perhaps the most obvious sign of the importance of the rose in Christianity are the magnificent rose windows in many churches and cathedrals. These are often dedicated to Mary, and she is depicted sitting in the middle. At Westminster Abbey an inscription on the floor says (in Latin), As the rose is the flower of flowers, so is this the house of houses.

The allegorical Roman de la Rose , the story of a lover searching for his ladys love (the rose of the title), shows that in the 13th century the rose still stood for human (as well as spiritual) love. It describes a dream in which a lover is on a quest to pluck a rose, which he has seen on a rose bush reflected in the Fountain of Love at the center of a walled garden. The poem became one of the most influential and controversial works of the Middle Ages.

On a more practical level, a late 13th-century storekeepers records, found in the debris of a perfume workshop in the Frankish castle at Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese, show the trade in perfumed oils, including rose. This would have required the production of large numbers of blooms, and sophisticated equipment to produce the oil, and indicates how much rose perfume was valued.

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Most peoples immediate reaction to seeing a rose is to smell it. Even young children are drawn to smelling roses. A deliciously fragrant rose has the wonderful ability to both calm us down and raise our spirits.

Fragrances are generally strongest after a period of warm weather and immediately following some light rain, when the atmosphere is humid. They often develop and change as a flower opens, so its important not to judge a varietys fragrance by a single bloom: if the flower is too young or too old, it is unlikely to smell of anything. Smell each variety on a regular basis: fragrances will often change dramatically from hour to hour, day to day, season to season, and even year to year.