Tag: rose

From “Rose Family (Rosaceae)” in Look at a Flower  by Anne Ophelia Dowden:

“This large family is found in all parts of the world, but especially in the northern temperate regions. It varies so much that some botanists think it should be split up into several
families.

“Roses are probably the best known and best loved of all garden flowers. But, though they have given their name to the family, they form only a very small part of it. Much more important to man are the fruit-bearing trees: apple, pear, cherry, plum, peach; and the berry-covered vines: strawberry, black-berry, raspberry. Almond fruits look much like apricots, but their seed is the nut we eat. Rose fruits (hips) are edible and were used in England during World War II as a valuable source of vitamin C.

“Medicines are derived from a number of the plants in this family: almond, wild-cherry, peach, blackberry. The leaves of burnet are a delicate addition to salads. And the wood of some trees — cherry, apple — is valuable for furniture and engraving.

“Our gardens and countrysides are full of beautiful members of the family…”

From “The Round” by Stanley Kunitz in Heart of the Flower: Poems for the Sensuous Gardener by Sondra Zeidenstein:

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees…

this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me….

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring a variety of early summer roses from Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens. The first post is Some Perfect Roses (1 of 2). For the photos in this post, I zoomed in for a close look at some of the details of individual flowers, filling the frames with rose petals and buds.

I was recently amused to learn that what we call rose “thorns” are technically not thorns at all, but the botanically correct term is “prickles” — because there is a scientific difference between thorns, spines, and prickles, described in some detail in the article How Did a Rose Get Its Prickles? Well, maybe so, but rewriting the famous Poison song to Every Rose Has Its Prickles doesn’t quite work, does it?

🙂

Thanks for taking a look!

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

From Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding by Noel Kingsbury:

“Roses are the favorite flower of the Christian and the Muslim worlds: varying hugely in color (but famously never blue), shape, and scent, and are loaded with cultural significance and symbolism. The ancestral rose, Rosa gallica, may have been pink, but it threw up genetic combinations for red forms early and was stable enough to be still very important in rose breeding. It dominated the gene pool of the rose until the nineteenth century….

“‘Old’ roses flower only once every year, in early summer. The Chinese R. chinensis, however, carries genes for repeat flowering, so its introduction brought about a revolution in rose breeding. However, the repeat flowering habit was recessive, which limited the breeding possibilities in the early nineteenth century, in addition to which hybrids between this species and others were usually sterile….

“[A] fertile cross was achieved in France in the 1830s and gave rise to the hybrid perpetual group. As well as flowering only once, ‘old’ roses were also only available on a spectrum from crimson to white. It was not until the 1820s that the first yellow rose species were introduced to Europe and the United States, but it took many decades before successful hybrids were created….

“The French Joseph Pernet-Ducher (1859- 1928), regarded by many as the greatest rose breeder of all time, created the first yellow roses; his hybrid tea class ‘Soleil d’Or’ of 1900 was the first ‘real’ yellow, as opposed to the wishy-washy yellows of previous attempts….

“Importations of roses from China were frequent during the nineteenth century; often they arrived on cargo ships bearing tea, which led to the roses which were bred from them to be dubbed ‘tea’ roses. Many had a touch of yellow, were well scented, and, unlike the flat blooms of traditional European roses, had a slight point in the center of the flower. This point gave each flower a very different character to what people were used to — and made the flower look particularly attractive just as it was about to burst out — a bud that spoke of promise as well as beauty. “

From “One Perfect Rose” by Dorothy Parker in The RHS Book of Garden Verse by the Royal Horticultural Society:

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
     All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet —
     One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
     ‘My fragile leaves’, it said, ‘his heart enclose.’
Love long has taken for his amulet
     One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
     One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
     One perfect rose.

Hello!

The roses featured in this post (and the next one) played a supporting role in one of my previous posts (see Orange and White Irises — and Creamsicles!), where I got them to pose as background color for the irises. You can see one of those irises in the first three images below, and get a sense of how many many-colored roses formed a border around them.

But with their long and complex cultural history, the roses deserved some attention of their own — so after finishing up my iris photography, I took their pictures too. They all may have been new plantings in this section of Oakland Cemetery’s Gardens, or I may have just passed them by or missed their blooming season in previous years — but they were a delight to see and the combinations of yellow, red, white, and orange colors were fun to photograph. Plantnet identified the roses in these photos with several possible variant names, including Austrian Copper Rose, Wichura’s Rose, Tea Rose, and French Rose — which probably reflects the color varieties as well as the varying flower structures you can see in the photos.

The quotation from Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding at the top of this post provides a widget of early rose breeding history, including mention of an “ancestral rose” called Rosa gallica from which most of our modern roses were hybridized and developed. Rosa gallica presents a simpler form than the roses in this post — typically with a single row of flower petals similar to a dog rose or even anemone flower — but its genetic characteristics made it possible to create variants with other colors, flower forms, and blooming frequencies. In The Rose: A True History, author Jennifer Potter describes this rose as “the foundation species from which most of our garden roses have evolved.”

Now you know a little about the origin story of roses!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

---

---

---

---

---

---

---