Love, sex and death: Our near-universal obsession with the rose

The rose is the most ravishingly beautiful and fragrant of flowers. Genus Rosa has flourished on this earth for some 40 million years and has served our physical and spiritual needs for millennia. Its exquisitely delicate petals and savage prickles (commonly described as thorns) comprise a conjunction of opposites that, for centuries, has inspired writers, artists and designers who have drawn allusions to love, beauty, sexuality, sin, degradation and death. No flower is more entwined with myth, religion and other stories; cultural production and politics; nor more likened to the human — mostly female — body and emotions. Phaidon’s visually stunning new publication The Rose Book interrogates and rejoices our near-universal relationship with this flower of flowers.

In the second century the rose was personified as female and crowned queen of the flowers by the Greek writer Achilles Tatius in his romantic prose Leucippe and Clitophon. Despite being the most regal of flowers, the rose is also the most common. The shrub has such a broad geographic sweep — permitting so many to enjoy it — because it is resilient, promiscuous, and rambunctious. Whilst recognising the flowers’ Asian origins and global contexts, it is the British who have claimed the rose as their own (we describe delicate-looking young women as ‘English roses’).

It was from the 1870s that the British took the lead from France in growing cultivated roses. World-leading family firm David Austin (est. 1962; based in Shropshire), no doubt familiar to readers, now offer more than 200 gorgeous ‘English rose’ varieties to local and international growers. Imagine reviving the mid-1880s vogue for rose-themed garden parties, timed at the break of day or during moonlight when the flowers are at their most fulsome and fragrant. In 1884, the Vanderbilt’s — once the wealthiest family in the US — ordered 50,000 cut roses for their New York house-warming party, to which they welcomed 1,000 guests. Even today, wearing a single fresh rose marks an occasion out as ‘special’.

In the 21^st century we have seen a renaissance in roses and not only within naturalistic settings. In 2021, NEXT Architects designed a modernistic metal building to house Beijing’s new Rose Museum — imagine, a whole museum dedicated to one flower (above). And, once again, the rose has become highly politicised. In the past, there’s Britain’s War of the Roses and Germany’s anti-Nazi youth movement — which employed a white rose as their symbol of choice. In the present, the bloom has been harnessed to draw attention to vital issues such as racial equality, identity, sexuality, female genital mutilation, fair trade, sustainability and the environment.

My own special interest lies in the myriad ways in which the rose has inspired fashion, textiles, folk costume; everyday, sub-cultural and fancy dress, jewellery, body art and grooming. In Ancient Rome, a culture renowned for its extreme adoration of roses, it was men who wore perfume made from roses (women preferred more pungent scents). In the 18^th century, the western male elite wore the most magnificent flower-embroidered garments and accessories. It was not until the mid-19^th century that roses became synonymous with female fashion.

Roses are a fashion mainstay. It is couture designers Charles Frederick Worth, Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen — the latter dressing a male, female and gender-neutral clientele in extraordinary rose-inspired garments — whom I crown as fashion’s greatest rosarians.

Today, year-round, the world’s wealthiest consumers purchase roses grown by the world’s poorest workers. Standard, long-stemmed and budded roses that have little fragrance and drain local water resources — all before being flown round the world. They are not beautiful and they are certainly not romantic. Happily, there is a shift afoot, spearheaded by florists such as Shane Connolly — who was employed by TRH The Prince and Princess of Wales for their wedding — who are urging us to buy roses that are grown locally and in season. Roses that are truly ravishing.

The Rose Book (£34.94) is published by Phaidon on April 3.