Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  After the triumphal restoration of Charles II, the royalist sympathizer John Evelyn proposed a radical plan to banish all noxious industries from the capital, and to ring the city of London with sweet-smelling plantations of ‘fragrant and odiferous Flowers’, among them the Eglantine or Sweet Briar, ‘the Musk, and all other Roses’ – a plan that was part environmental tract, part allegory, intended to quell the ‘presumptuous Smoake’ of the Interregnum. And roses continued to play a role in the medicinal experiments of Robert Boyle, the Irish natural philosopher and scientist who had endured a sickly childhood and whose eyes gave him continual trouble. But as medicine became more professionalized, roses began to disappear from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sickrooms; the cultivation of medicinal red roses in England shrank to a mere ten acres around Mitcham in Surrey, with further crops in Oxfordshire and Derbyshire.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, the rose was all but emasculated in mainstream pharmacology, valued only in folk remedies and among the wilder fringes of unorthodox medicine, and for its aesthetic properties. Rose-hips enjoyed a brief revival during the Second World War, when wartime children were fed spoonfuls of rose-hip syrup to replace unobtainable citrus fruits and other sources of vitamin C, until even this benefit was refuted by a German regulatory commission of 1990, which declared the use of rose-hips in treating or preventing vitamin C deficiency to be ‘questionable’. So the announcement in September 2008 to a world congress on osteoarthritis that a patented rose-hip powder could bring relief to sufferers of this painful condition represented both a breakthrough and a vindication of one strand of ancient medicine, although aching joints as opposed to general aches and pains were absent from the conditions that rose preparations could reputedly cure. In the new study, however, researchers found that the powder was effective not simply in reducing inflammation, but also appeared able to protect cartilage cells from inflammatory assault and self-destruction.

  THE BEAUTY OF the rose, its many uses in everyday life (and death), and the sweet fragrance it imparted to lives conducted amid much squalor help to explain the flower’s enduring acclaim. But the real power of the rose lies in the way people from different societies and different ages have used the flower to say something about themselves, in effect transforming the rose into a symbol of deeply held values – cultural, religious, political – or simply using the rose to tell their stories. No other flower comes close in western culture for the sheer variety of ‘meanings’ people give to the rose, although there is an intriguing difference between the western rose and the eastern lotus. In the West, the rose slowly accumulated meanings as it developed into a flower of great beauty, while in the East, the lotus played a part from the very beginning in the creation myths that sought to explain how the world began.

  Of all its associations, the red rose as the flower of love has the longest history. Puzzling over why this should be, when the rose’s fragrance contains none of the sultry erotic odours such as indol (a component of animal faeces whose purpose in flowers is to attract insects), the German chemist and perfume expert Paul Jellinek found his answer not in the rose’s smell but in its colour and shape, which he judged suggestive of the female body and of kisses. In Jellinek’s view, the ripening bud, with its subtle hints of ‘the rounded abundance and fragrance of full maturity’, and the ravishing scent as it opened to full maturity, ‘are external manifestations of the flower’s life processes which man sees and senses and which stimulate his erotic fantasy’.

  The ancient Greeks saw it too and for me this is where the story of the rose truly begins: at the shrine of Aphrodite, goddess of love and human sexuality, where the poet Sappho planted roses in the second half of the seventh century BCE, invoking the goddess to appear in her ‘graceful grove of apple trees’ amid ‘altars smoking with frankincense’:

  And in it cold water makes a clear sound through apple branches and with roses the whole place is shadowed and down from radiant-shaking leaves sleep comes dropping.

  The Romans ran with this notion as far and as fast as they could. To them, roses were the harbingers of spring, carried by nubile young women such as the bare-breasted maiden holding a basket of roses in the second-century floor mosaic of Neptune and the four seasons at La Chebba in Roman Tunisia. They were also – and very obviously – linked with Venus, the Roman incarnation of Greek Aphrodite who presided over all sexual dealings from the third century BCE, whether between mortals and gods or among mere mortals. In Ovid’s Fasti, his calendar of Roman feast days, she takes April, the second month of the calendar after that of her husband, Mars; the poet exhorts Latin mothers, brides and those denied the garb of matrons – courtesans and prostitutes – to wash Venus’s statue, dry her and restore her golden necklaces: ‘now give her other flowers, now give her the fresh-blown rose’. In the first of the festivals dedicated to Venus and Jupiter, Ovid calls on prostitutes to celebrate Venus’s divinity, and to ‘give to the Queen her own myrtle and the mint she loves, and bands of rushes hid in clustered roses’.

  From here, two strands developed that saw the rose linked with romantic love on the one hand and sex on the other. Both strands came together in the French medieval masterpiece, the Roman de la Rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris in 1225 and finished some fifty years later by Jean de Meun, which became one of the most celebrated and controversial works of the time, lauded for its edifying humanism but bitterly condemned as scabrous and misogynistic in its graphic and, some said, gratuitous depiction of sex.

  Constructed as a dream narrative, the poem describes the Dream Lover entering a walled garden, where he falls in love with a rose glimpsed in the ‘perilous mirror’ of the Fountain of Narcissus. Among the garden’s many roses, the one he chooses brings Jellinek’s verdict to mind. Glowing red and pure ‘as the best that Nature can produce’, the bud sits on a stem as straight as a sapling, neither bent nor inclined, filling the whole area with its ‘sweet perfume . . . And when I smelled its exhalation, I had no power to withdraw.’ But when he snatches a kiss, the rose bushes are whisked away behind the walls of a garrisoned castle, and the narrative, now continued by de Meun, enters a literal and verbal battlefield as allegorized figures debate their differences until the Lover launches his final assault on the rose, reached through a narrow aperture placed between two pillars. When he is certain he is ‘absolutely the first’ to enter by that route, he takes the bud at his pleasure in an act that to modern sensibilities seems indistinguishable from rape:

  I seized the rosebud, fresher than any willow, by its branches, and when I could attach myself to it with both hands, I began very softly, without pricking myself, to shake the bud, since I had wanted it as undisturbed as possible . . . Finally, I scattered a little seed on the bud when I shook it, when I touched it within in order to pore over the petals. For the rosebud seemed so fair to me that I wanted to examine everything right down to the bottom. As a result, I so mixed the seeds that they could hardly be separated; and thus I made the whole tender rosebush widen and lengthen.

  One of the Roman’s fiercest critics was the lyric poet Christine de Pizan, who turned to poetry some time after the death in 1390 of her husband, a secretary to King Charles VI of France. Accusations and counter-accusations flew back and forth about the effrontery of seeking biblical support for sanctifying a woman’s ‘little rosebud’. Were the poem’s defenders led astray by St Luke, thundered one of de Pizan’s supporters, when he declared, ‘Every male that opened the womb shall be called holy to the Lord’? Using poetry to advance her cause, de Pizan composed her riposte Dit de la Rose in 1402, in which she was asked, also in a dream, to found a chivalric order that would bestow its ‘dear and lovely roses’ only on those knights who upheld a woman’s virtue and reputation, in obvious contrast to Jean de Meun, who viewed a woman’s ‘rose’ as there for the taking. (Britain’s Knights of the Garter follow in the tradition of decorating their collars with roses.)

  De Pizan situated her narrative on St Valentine’s Day, com
memorated to this day as the occasion for lovers to exchange tokens of their affection – traditionally red roses – but then only recently ‘invented’ as a day for lovers, apparently by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his circle. In his poem the Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer chose the feast day of the martyred St Valentine, 14 February, to mark the annual gathering of birds for the purpose of choosing their mates, although no one is quite sure why this particular saint should be linked to the first matings of spring, when the weather is hardly springlike.

  In an irony worth savouring, it was Christine de Pizan, the arch-critic of the Roman de la Rose, who added roses to the celebration. She would have hated the ribaldry and innuendo with which many later writers treated the rose – most of all, Shakespeare, for whom the ‘bud’ of a girl’s adolescence was ripe for the plucking but immediately lost its freshness as the flower opened and became (over)‘blown’. Shakespeare was drawing on a rich seam of Elizabethan slang in which the rose took many meanings, pre-eminently sexual ones, as maidenhead, vulva, whore, courtesan, young girl, sexually used woman, syphilitic sore; to ‘pluck a rose’ might imply either taking a girl’s virginity or pissing in the open air. Yet Shakespeare could equally use the rose to express the tragedy of time passing and a woman’s fading beauty, as in Cleopatra’s anguished cry:

  See, my women,

  Against the blown rose may they stop their nose

  That kneeled unto the buds.

  The ripening rose also provided an arresting medical image for a woman’s sexual parts in the anatomical textbook by Shakespeare’s near contemporary Helkiah Crooke, a medical practitioner and later governor of Bethlem Hospital. Writing about female anatomy, Crooke described the hymen as being composed of ‘little peeces of flesh and membranes’, which together took the form ‘of the cup of a little rose half blowne when the bearded leaves are taken away’. Taking a wider view, Crooke adjusted his metaphor to the ‘Great Clove Gilly-flower when it is moderately blowne’.

  And so it continues to this day, the rose blossoming into a metaphor for sexual love and for a woman’s sexual parts in the work of poets, painters, dramatists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and medical professionals of all kinds. (Sigmund Freud is reputed to have compared the vulva to a rose, but the flower in question was the visually similar camellia.) In recent years, the British poet Jo Shapcott’s meditations on the rose poems written in French by the Czech-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke led her to conclude that Rilke’s roses were women, and ‘more than that – petal – space – petal – these poems were versions of female genitalia’. In the poems provoked by such a reading, Shapcott has her roses answer back, pointing out to Rilke where he is wrong, ‘saying, in effect: “It’s not like that, it’s like this”’. Rilke’s Les Roses IX, for instance, with its ‘troubling odour of naked saint’, goes beyond temptation to become the ultimate lover, so far from Eve but still ‘infinitely possessing the fall’. Shapcott’s ‘Rosa Sancta’ will have none of it:

  Now you’ve made a

  a saint out of me,

  Saint Rose, open-handed,

  she who smells of God naked.

  But for myself, I’ve learned

  to love the whiff of mildew

  Because though not Eve, exactly,

  yes, I stink of the Fall.

  For all their bickering, both poets point to the rose’s extraordinary ability to express conflicting notions of the sacred and the profane, just as it had in the early centuries of the Christian era when the Church fathers did all they could to outlaw this flower so tainted by pagan associations. Springing, like Judaism itself, from the stony desert lands of Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean, the early Christians had no place for flowers; there are none in the Eden of Genesis and very few in either the Talmud or the Bible as a whole, at least in the original Hebrew.4 Rose garlands and crowns were especially despised and the early fathers forbade their use, contrasting such wanton earthly diadems with Christ’s crown of thorns and thistles. But gradually a remarkable transformation took place, which saw the rose cast off its pagan garb to emerge as one of the great symbols of Christian iconography, combining the white rose of Mary’s purity with the red rose of Christ’s martyrdom and in particular the Five Wounds of His Passion, a cult that reached its peak in the late Middle Ages when the language used to express it became increasingly morbid and erotic.

  The transition from sinner to saint was achieved over many centuries. In the early years, when the Church was subject to ferocious persecution, roses began to appear in the visions of Paradise experienced by Christian martyrs, and in the legends of saints such as St Cecilia, boiled in a bath and then beheaded because she refused to submit her God-promised virginity to her husband; and St Dorothy, whose martyrdom bore the same sweet smell of the roses of Paradise. (St Elizabeth of Hungary’s ‘miracle of the roses’ is a later example, when the bread she was secretly carrying to the poor reputedly turned into roses, allowing her charity to remain undetected.) Then theologians and Church leaders began to draw roses into their thinking: St Ambrose, for instance, who declared that in Eden before the Fall, roses grew without thorns, indirectly incarnating Mary as the thornless rose, an idea later developed by St Bernard of Clairvaux in his sermons on the biblical Song of Songs.

  Legend has it that St Benedict planted a little rose garden – il roseto – outside his hermit’s cave at Subiaco, delighting his senses with the flowers and mortifying his flesh with its thorns. Even real roses were finding their way into the house of God, grown for their healing virtues in monastery infirmary gardens and eventually permitted in church decoration. The monks must have loved them, too. When Emperor Charlemagne’s religious and educational adviser Alcuin of York bid farewell to his dearly loved cell, he celebrated its roses and lilies in verse: ‘Thy cloisters smell of apple-trees in the gardens, and white lilies mingle with little red roses.’ The rose naturally appears in the extraordinary gardening poems written in the mid-ninth century by another Benedictine monk, Walahfrid Strabo, when he was abbot of Reichenau. Reserving the rose until last, he celebrates it as ‘the Flower of Flowers’, revered for its beauty, its fragrance and the many healing virtues of its rose oil, ‘a cure for mankind’s ailments’. As we saw in Chapter 2, he ends his poem by musing on the spiritual meanings of the rose and the lily, two flowers, he says, ‘so loved and widely honoured’ that have stood throughout the ages as symbols of the Church’s greatest treasures: the rose in token of the blood shed by the Blessed Martyrs and the lily as a shining badge of its faith.

  After Walahfrid’s time, despite the lily’s continuing importance as the flower of Mary’s innocence and purity, roses gradually inched ahead as the Church’s supreme flower, celebrated by the Catholic Church as the Golden Rose, a sacred ornament of exquisite workmanship blessed by popes for centuries on Laetare Sunday and conferred on illustrious churches, sanctuaries, royalty, military figures and governments. Dante Alighieri brought his Divine Comedy to a close with just such a supreme flower: Paradise itself as a pure white rose, fragrant through all eternity, and vast enough to contain the two ‘courts’ of heaven, angels and human souls, with Mary Queen of Heaven sitting on the highest petal, closest to the sun. William Blake re-imagined this same rose as a giant sunflower (see Chapter 3), but for Dante, this Paradise-rose brought a mystic vision of eternal glory. The American academic Barbara Seward has called it one of the most complex symbols in literature – Dante’s attempt to concentrate in a flower his answer to the riddle of the universe. Led through Hell and Purgatory to Heaven by his dead love, Beatrice Portinari, the poet conflated ‘the rose of carnal and adulterous courtly love’ with ‘the mystic symbol of the soul’s marriage to its God and with the flower of the saints, the Virgin, Paradise, and Christ . . . Love is the end as it was the beginning of Dante’s journey and of all that is.’

  AS CHRISTIAN POETS have drawn on the rose for many of their most potent images, so have poets of the Moslem world, in old Persia especially, where the great poets of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Sa’di (Musharrif al-Din Muslih) and Hafez (Shams al-Din Muhammad) – both from Shiraz, city of roses – sang frequently, even ‘wearisomely’, of roses. The snub comes from Vita Sackville-West, who nonetheless fell under the country’s spell when she visited in 1926 to see her diplomat husband Harold Nicolson, then working at the Legation in Teheran; her short memoir Passenger to Teheran is packed with Persian roses.

  Roses still permeate Iranian culture today, whether planted in gardens or laid on commemorative tombs; celebrated by poets, artists and mystics; transformed into rosewater and attar of roses; painted on decorative boxes or embedded in religious architecture; or paired with the traditional nightingale, gul-o-bulbul, lover and beloved in countless poems, paintings and tiles, like the one that sits on my desk in memory of a visit to Iran in 2009, which gave me more rose images than my rose book could possibly accommodate.

  As in the Christianized West, the rose in Islam enjoys spiritual, even mystical connotations. Like the early Christian fathers, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers came out of the desert, so the flower itself is absent from the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book containing the divine revelations received by the Prophet in the last twenty years of his life. Roses are absent, too, from the Paradise gardens promised by the Qur’an as a reward to believers and martyrs who can look forward to a place of green shade and gurgling fountains, plenteous fruit and cool pavilions – the delights of a desert oasis, in fact, where they can also expect to find themselves among the virginal houris of Paradise. But while the Qur’an anticipates no actual roses in Paradise, the Hadiths or collected sayings of the Prophet have given the rose a spiritual origin. According to these sources, as the Prophet made his miraculous night journey into the Divine Presence, some drops of his sweat fell to the ground, from which sprang the first fragrant rose. Later Hadiths elaborated further, suggesting that droplets of sweat falling from different parts of the Prophet’s body created the different varieties of rose. When the Prophet saw a rose, they say he kissed it and placed it on his eyes. He also regarded the rose as the manifestation of God’s glory; and mystics such as Jalal-al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) from Afghanistan and Ruzbihan Baqli from Shiraz placed the rose at the heart of the mystic experience. ‘The red rose is part of the splendour of God,’ wrote Baqli; ‘everyone who wants to look into God’s splendour should look at the red rose.’