Thy Name Is Rose

In one of those moments of sweet surrender, when one simply decides to say ‘enough is enough’ or anyway something similar to this, and simply confide in time and universe and after a long, long time of deciduous concentration and permanent attention being paid to every tiny detail

I’ve made up my mind to loosen up things and simply let the amazing fragrances and colors present in my mind only in this rather freezing season haunt me in their entire splendor. Most of those being asked to express their likes and dislikes in the matter of flowers would say that the flower I shall make reference to is undeniably recognizable and has earned its world known fame priding on such traits as its resplendent, ostentatious and even sumptuous coloring, its almost majestic shaping and last but not least important its unparalleled memorable fragrance. I am referring to a flower which despite its thorny beauty commands respect and it certainly came to be included in the list of the most requested and appreciated flowers, being some sort of a zenith flower, the obelisk of them all, if it was for me to use a figure of speech. Much sang by poets, painted by famous masters skillfully handling such things as a brush, some watercolors, a drawing table and undeniably lots and lots of talent, this flower’s name has certainly been on the lips and minds of many people; it all started centuries ago, times immemorial as some would rightfully say and it all extended to nowadays too. After all “A rose by any other name would it smell as sweet?” Guess not…and as such I need to prove this to you by calling all weapons at hand, do I?

I guess for those who have declared themselves irrevocably in love with roses, there is no deep held secret anymore, yet those who could not make up their minds and decide which is the top flower in their preferences, the mere sketching of this flower and recalling of its memorable fragrance may certainly trigger some reactions. Even petrified ones could not remain insensible or better said numb to the beauty brought by nature.

As James M. Barrie once said “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” I could paraphrase this all and say that I would not mind having roses in January either. Who would? Would you? Unless you happen to be fed up with their name and have decided to be more individualistic in your flower preferences or simply feel like you’ve had just enough of rose, rose, rose, and even so there is no reason whatsoever to despise it, merely coming to accept it as another flower spreading its roots in the grounds of this planet, then you may as well end up saying “It exists. I exist. We coexist.”

I guess I am too philosophical these days…It must be the early hours I am writing this because I simply happened to not be able to sleep and tossing and turning around in bed I have decided to wake up and do something profitable…So, here it is my all “covered” pleading for roses.

And since flowers are there to enchant us and amaze us with their unique fragrances, therefore it could be said that it all comes down to a matter of likes and dislike, personal preferences after all. As such, even though I was not asked to say which my favorite one among them is, meaning to say flowers, I am going to content myself with saying that roses are nevertheless beautiful and special as there happen to be other flowers as well. I guess one simply needs some time and patience to discover them all and decide or not necessarily decide but instead rather let them all pervade his whole being whenever the occasion appears. Like Emma Goldman once said “I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.” I guess you may replace the name of roses with any other flower or you may opt for having both of them. I guess it all comes down to a matter of personal choice. Most women would prefer having both of them and even more. Isn’t it so ladies? I am not saying that this is a wide option; as I’ve said it and I need to stress it out, “Diamond’s may be a woman’s best friend”, yet flowers manage to enlighten her face as well. If only I could use a smiley face here, I’d surely not hesitate to make use of it.

It is believed to have all started with a mentioning of a “hundred-petaled rose” as Theophrastus, the father of Botany as he has often been referred to, used to write in one of his books, a book significantly entitled “Enquiry into plants and De Causis Plantarum” and it went on with a whole fascinating history, or perhaps the more appropriate words here would be as follows: going on managing to trigger a whole fascination theme around them and an incredible number of myths and stories as well. They are often associated with such concepts as elegance and luxury and it all probably goes back to those times when it had rather taken roots that the wealthy spread rose petals and poured rose oil in their baths. Less enchanting, to say so, was the fact that in the case of some ladies who belonged to the high society of those times, the society where apparently the air was more rarified or denser to be mean, ladies who used to call themselves “noblewomen” got used to carry with them bouquets of fragrant flowers not because they thought they would embellish them in any way or that they could not live without them, assigning those flowers as being their favorite ones, but rather because they wished to cover body odors. Personal hygiene was not that trendy or fashionable at that time, at least this is what all the nowadays gossiping says.

It is a flower which managed to trigger wars or at least give its name to wars…you all probably heard by now about the already famous war of roses and as such I am not going to develop the matter. Surprisingly enough rumors say that Columbus discovered America because of a rose. It is said to have all started on October 11, 1492 in the Sargasso Sea, when one of Columbus’s assistants picked a rose branch from the water. Between the two of us or the more of us, as the case happens to be, after reading this do you still continue to wonder how roses managed to trigger so much interest in people and poets, singers, painters around the world? I for one stopped wondering. I have it all mentioned in the above information. And just to prove it all again to you I shall continue by saying that it was in fact this branch of rose that spelled land to them and as such they regained their courage and continued their way on to the New World.

What if a rose branch brought light into your life too? I guess this is the case of many of us whenever we happen to have a nice bouquet of roses, since I guess we do not content ourselves with just a branch of rose, in a nice vase on our working desk or generally speaking, around us. I do not have any right now, yet I shall be waiting patiently for their season to make place to them again.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” Much like Shakespeare used to write and kept on being haunted by this kind of questions (no offense here, just a matter of speech I happen to be using), I guess you all know the origin of the name rose. It is said to have its roots in the Latin word rosa. And if it were for us to give credit to all rumors we’d say that roses have accompanied us in our pilgrimage through this world for millions of years, being cultivated for so long that it’s almost impossible to decide when or where this flower first appeared. It goes back to the Egyptians who are said to have built real masterpiece rose gardens and even used to take a tiny piece of this earthy beauty with them in the grave. It even gained so much popularity among Egyptians that it came to replace the very lotus and install itself quite comfortably in the row of flowers being used in ceremonies.

And since I mentioned Egyptians, completely out of subject, the words of a song came to my mind. I guess you know it very well: “All the kids in the marketplace say: / Way-oh-way-oh-way-ooo-aaa-ooo…/ Walk like an Egyptian. / Side your feet up the streets / Bend your back / Shift your arm then you pull it back / Like Sergeant O (Oh-Way-Oh) / So strike a pose on a Cadillac”. Should we all be walking like an Egyptian looking for what was left of the now hibernating roses? Or should I be saying that we should all be walking towards whatever manages to attract our attention and keep it alert for more than a second or two, depending on the case? Either way, roses existed and populated the lives of Egyptians and Greeks and Romans as well.

If it was for us to go back to the times of gods, the Greek gods this time, we would be introduced to the information according to which roses were created while gods still inhabited planet earth. Being known either as “the king of flowers” and afterwards becoming “the queen of flowers” under the magic writing of the well known poetess Sappho in her “Ode to the Rose”, the rose is believed to have been born with Aphrodite just to prove that it could somehow match the flawless beauty gods had come up with. If you know what I am talking about you probably happened to see Botticelli’s painting entitled “Birth of Venus”, a painting which associates the image of Venus emerging from the sea with dozens of roses. Therefore beauty has become the synonym of rose; roses have come to be translated into pure perfection and uniqueness. As such, it is no wonder love has often been compared or personified by roses in poems and afterwards transposed in real life situations.

Talking about love and roses and poems…all of these terms being brought together under the same shelter I cannot fail to call upon Robert Burns’s words, mainly because he was the one who compared his “luve” to a “red, red rose, that newly sprung in June”. Did you know for example that once upon a time there was a German custom ruling that the groom send a silver rose to his bride before the marriage ceremony took place? As romantic or less romantic this custom may have been, it is said that it all originated in the plot presented in Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier.

The mere lines “Roses are red, violet are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you” clearly come to suggest that love and roses have long come hand in hand along the path of time, yet what I was unaware of was the fact that the rose came to also be regarded as the symbol of secrecy. I managed to read somewhere that in sixteenth-century England, the habit of wearing a rose behind the ear was to be interpreted as a clear sign that what was heard would remain forever concealed to all the other people, thus remaining a well kept secret, under the lock of roses. Therefore, feel free to tell me anything “under the rose”! It will remain between the two of us because my lips will get stuck and my ears will keep it all for them, all these under the spell of roses.

You may as well wonder where the expression “under the rose” comes from. It is said that it all comes from the custom of “carving a rose over the door of the confessional in a Catholic church”. Therefore, once you had a rose or a dozen of them, it can be said that you’ve had it all: love, poetry, color, secrecy, beauty, perfection, fragrance. Am I exaggerating? The thing that came to my mind right now refers to the saying according to which “happiness is to be found in small things.” Perhaps this comes at times to be truer than ever.

“Days of wine and roses laugh and run away, like a child at play.” – much like Johnny Mercer who said this I could say that there are some days in this life of ours that are placed under the sign of roses, their color, their presence, their inebriating fragrances. Arthur Miller once asked the following question: “Can anyone remember love?” He was the one who provided the answer to this question: “It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.” Interesting mode of approaching love or better said the concept of love, don’t you think so?

Most often the notion of romance or romantic people is associated with the idea of spreading rose petals around a certain area that comes to be populated by two lovers later on or while spreading them. “What a waste of time and energy!” – Some would say. Better keep the roses around us in whole than per pieces…better appreciate them all than piece by piece…It all comes down to just a matter of taste or was it roses? I am not sure yet which one is it.

It all seems to go back to the time of Romans when the Roman emperor Nero simply appeared to love covering its guests under a cloud of rose petals. Supposedly, at times, this cloud proved to be not as pleasant as it may sound to many of us right now, mainly because it could get them suffocated.

It has often been said that a single rose speaks volumes and I’d add to this that it can speak fragrances as well, scents that one could recognize with his eyes closed. At least this is how I see and even smell things. If you ever wondered from what are rose perfumes made, then you are just about to be revealed part of the mystery. I’ve said “part of it” because the other part of the mystery is carefully kept by the creators of perfumes around the world, those who would not let go of their long kept secret of the sometimes rather incredible fragrances being hosted by their manufacturing houses. It is believed that the whole technique originated in Persia and later on spread on to the Arab and Indian lands. Nowadays the very production’ center is located in Bulgaria, in the so called Rose Valley. How poetic all this sounds!

If you happen to be a fan of rose fragrances then I happen to have a soap smelling like roses and I can start an auction. Who wishes to make bids for it? Anyone there who wishes to have it? Do I hear something? I guess all rose fans have been turned to silence by that secrecy pledge I mentioned somewhere above. Note: It was all meant to be a joke. Placing bids or not on a soap, no matter if this one happens to be one carrying the scent of roses, is just a “short break”, sort of a “breath of air” amid so many surrounding imaginary roses and fragrances coming from them.

Making reference to the surrounding roses, either the real or imaginary ones, there is no possible way I could fail to mention the works of Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet who have deliberated and included roses in their paintings. It looks like roses have really been quite a rich source of inspiration for numerous talented painters and skilled writers and poets as well. Important historical characters or characters who stood next to people who played their role in history, used roses for a wide variety of purposes. You’d be probably surprised or not to hear that Josephine, the very Empress of France, the wife of Napoleon, assigned roses a more weird, singular use. Josephine…I think there is even a song mentioning this name, something that sounds like this: There’s rain on my window / But I’m thinking of you / Tears on my pillow / But I will come through / Josephine, I’ll send you all my love / And every single step that I’ll take / I’ll take for you / My, Josephine / There is a storm on my radar / But I can still fly / Oh, and you are the reason / The blue in my sky / Josephine “ (take this as a mouthful of fresh air amid an oasis full of roses)…Napoleon’s wife had the ingenious idea of building an entire garden of roses at her estate at Malmaison, a garden comprising a whole variety of roses. Rumors say that there were over 250 varieties of roses there in the respective garden. What is interesting is the use she gave to these roses. It is s said that she had built a complex because her teeth were rather imperfect and as such every time she felt like smiling she raised a rose to her lips. This complex must have haunted her seriously to get to do this! I’ve seen it nowadays too, yet the hand kept replacing the rose this time. No offense for those who do this…I am not here to be a judger but rather to tell things from my perspective….Right or wrong as this one happens to be…

How do roses smell? I’d say that they clearly happen to have a distinctive, easily recognizable smell. There were voices who said that roses smelled like hay, various spices and even green tea. I for one can not forget the taste of rose pedals in rose jam. This taste hunted my childhood much like the taste of madeleines haunted Proust…However this jam certainly did no harm to me because I managed to later on discover that rose hips have a quite high content of Vitamin C, higher than any other fruit or vegetable. Yet, according to evidences nowadays people are not the first ones to discover the taste of rose petals, as these ones were used to flavor salads in the eighteenth century and ice creams too, yet I guess the last part was expected by everyone.

And even though it is in no way connected to taste but rather to smell I shall mention Cleopatra as well. How could I forget such beauty associated with other beauty, namely that of the much portrayed roses? Her relationship with Marc Antony has already reached legendary proportions, as did her milk and honey baths, yet I guess few knew about the passion she had developed for rose petals and their smell. Easy to imagine that whenever she met Marc Antony she used what I would suggestively call “the rose stratagem”, meaning she simply filled the quarters in which she lived with hundreds if not thousands of rose petals meant to make Marc Antony associate her with the rather prevailing scent of  roses. This way she kind of made sure that he never forgot her when being apart. Apparently her subterfuge or better said her tactics worked on him. As such you can all see that even a small part of a rose can work miracles in matters of love or “Corazon” as the Spanish would say. I’d say that it all goes down to the power we assign to flowers.

Amazingly enough roses have proven to be able to reach quite impressive age, being some sort of vampires in the world of flowers. Sorry for the comparison but this was just the first thing that crossed my mind. It must be the impact movies had on me or my “tormented” mind only. Going back to age I’d have to mention that it was discovered that the oldest living rose on earth reached the age of 1,000 years. Where do you think this vampire rose could be located? If you have in mind a German cathedral then you surely think about the Cathedral of Hildesheim which is said to have been there, adorning it and having certainly accompanied many generations, seeing, yet keeping for itself “under the rose” to use the already patented expression, all the tears, the smiles, the love declarations it witnessed along the time. To me more exact, it is said that its very beginnings there go back to A.D. 815. And if this did not manage to impress you in any way as you probably said “And what?”,  then what I am just about to tell you certainly leave one open-mouthed: Rumors say that even though in 1945 the cathedral came to be destroyed under bombings, the bush of roses miraculously survived. It is said that its roots “remained intact under the debris”. What can I say when finding this out if not wish this rose bush to continue to live long time ahead from now and continue to witness it all, no matter if we are talking about the joys or sorrows of life?

After all they have been classified by some as being old, perpetual or ever blooming. As you probably imagine by now this classification makes reference to the moment when roses bloom, either in early summer, in autumn and early summer or all summer long. As for further details I am going to say just that many of the climbing roses we happen to like are to be included in the first mentioned category, namely that of old roses. No matter the case, meaning the category they belong to, roses happen to be nevertheless impressive and majestic in their shaping and fragrance.

Have you ever ended up asking yourself “what is a rose or what is there in a rose that makes it so special?” There clearly must be something special that people deem in this flower, something that makes it highly appreciated all around the world, or at least this is what rumors claim to be true. As for the questions one may end up asking oneself, perhaps the simplest answer is the one once offered by Gertrude Stein who wrote the following line: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” So, next time you are haunted by rather philosophical questions remember this answer and it all may come to an end sooner than you’ve ever thought it possible.

As for the colors in which these flowers come, there is a quite wide variety of them nowadays because together with science things started getting a little bit more complicated. As such you should not be surprised if you come across a blue rose. Therefore the old line saying “Roses are red…” may prove to be no longer valid. Who knows after all what future holds for us in matter of flowers and the colors they display?

For now they can be found displaying red, orange, pink, yellow or purple tones and as I have previously mentioned blue! If you happen to know other colors in roses please let me know. I wish to know it all. By saying this I cannot but hope that I will have a better fate than the cat did. You know the old saying: Curiosity killed the cat…Joking! After all I may end up saying what Syd Barett said “Have you seen the roses? There’s a whole lot of colors.”

As for the blue roses, they are to be met in Rudyard Kipling’s poem, a poem entitled “Blue Roses”: “Roses red and roses white / Plucked I for my love’s delight. / She would none of all my posies– / Bade me gather her blue roses. / Half the world I wandered through, / Seeking where such flowers grew. / Half the world unto my quest / Answered me with laugh and jest. / Home I came at winter tide. / But my silly love had died / Seeking with her latest breath / Roses from the arms of Death. / It may be beyond the grave / She shall find what she would have. / Mine was but an idle quest– / Roses white and red are best!”