The rose is bursting with meaning. Over the centuries it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death and the mystical unknown. Today the rose enjoys unrivalled popularity across the globe, ever present at life's seminal moments.

Grown in the Middle East two thousand years ago for its pleasing scent and medicinal properties, it has become one of the most adored flowers across cultures, no longer selected by nature, but by us. The rose is well-versed at enchanting human hearts. From Shakespeare's sonnets to Bulgaria's Rose Valley to the thriving rose trade in Africa and the Far East, via museums, high fashion, Victorian England and Belle Epoque France, we meet an astonishing array of species and hybrids of remarkably different provenance.

This is the story of a hardy, thorny flower and how, by beauty and charm, it came to seduce the world.

Excerpt

Any self-proclaimed cultural history of this special plant must be ready to engage with the notion of ‘culture’ in the two senses defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: ‘the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group’, and also ‘the act or process of cultivating living material’. When approached as a plant the rose is primarily something of interest to the botanist and gardener, and related to the various meanings given to the care and cultivation of the natural world, and to the practical and economic considerations that arise from this attention. Engaging with the rose as a plant means recognizing its dependency on the soil, the elements and, often, the imperfect regard of concerned humans. We will then be concerned with the ecologically and biologically particular, which is determined by time and characterized by uncertainty, and this has the effect of rooting us in the earth and keeping us in contact with the tangible.

Crucial to the story of this organic rose is the fact that before the second half of the nineteenth century, as the British horticulturalist Jack Harkness writes, ‘nearly all European roses flowered for a few weeks like the cherry, the lilac, the hawthorn, the apple and the broom.

Th e miracle of flowering again and again made the rose a very special plant.’ In what often seems like an obsessive quest for a ‘master race’ of marketable roses, breeders created rose plants that would be significantly different from (what they saw as an ‘improvement’ upon) the roses of the past. In practice this meant that, equipped with the scientific knowledge that allowed for a more reliable outcome, and encouraged by very favourable market forces, modern rose breeders aimed to take the best characteristics of the roses traditionally native to Europe and the Near East and blend them with the roses of China. The result of such dedicated attention is the dominant roses of today; recent, humanly engineered mutations, the products of artificial selection. They are very different from the roses Shakespeare must have had in mind when he imagined Juliet likening Romeo to one. The word Shakespeare used is the same we use, and symbolically speaking the

associations it conjures up remain closely allied with those of Shakespeare’s time. But the plant is very different. In fact, the roses of today are even significantly different from the ones our four representative voices from the beginning of the twentieth century would have known. So the impact on the physical nature of the rose of this sustained human interest cannot be underestimated. Roses are thoroughly ‘people plants’, in the sense that many of them are wholly intertwined with human interests and values.

In thinking about how the rose might continue to replicate and reinvent itself, we must also consider how humanity’s relationship with it is being changed in the light of the current ecological crisis. Once upon a time, human historical narratives (traditionally narrowed to the stories told by and about powerful male humans) were characterized by overt or implicit praise of humanity’s uniqueness, superiority and essentially benign role. We could claim to be custodians of God’s creation, or of Earth’s bounty. But today in the Anthropocene, we have become painfully aware of the devastating effects humanity is having on the Earth’s ecosystem, and especially of how the failure to address the crisis will impact on future generations. Th e logic of the technoscientific system – the domination of fauna and flora, but also other peoples and cultures – has increasingly set humanity at odds with nature, but this tacit assumption of our superiority to the rest of the natural world is being profoundly challenged, and while the exceptional character of the human ‘animal’ when compared to all the others, even our closest mammalian relatives, is beyond question, we are now coming to terms with the realization that in the not too distant future

we might become extinct along with millions of other organisms, and that this collective demise to a significant extent will be due to our monumental stupidity. Seen from a non-anthropocentric perspective, and from the midst of today’s ecological crisis, human ‘reason’, perverted into a rigid and nature-abhorring ‘rationalism’, looks worryingly malign.

You might think that this tragic situation, and the soul-searching it makes necessary, need not trouble us while considering something as innocuous as the cultural history of the rose. But it seems obvious to me that if we are to do the rose full justice, it needs to be seen within this wider contemporary context of ecological crisis, just as we must consider the history of the rose in relation to the perceived prejudices of the past, and not simply as a delightfully coloured and sweetly scented escape from these realities.

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About the Author

Simon Morley is a British artist and art historian. He is the author of several books and catalogue essays on modern and contemporary art, and his art reviews and essays have been published in numerous magazines and journals, including the TLS, Modern Painters, Tate Magazine, the Independent on Sunday, World Art and Third Text. Previously a lecturer at the Sotheby's Institute and at Winchester School of Art, he is now Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Dankook University, Republic of Korea. He is also a keen rose gardener.