Salt Lake Tribune | 1904-07-03 | Page 24 | The Origin of Roses

The Origin of Roses. The royal rose has a pedigree to shame any other queen it is so long, so full of enchanting turna and twists, and ix delightfully cumbered with myth, fable and history. She is, in a way, a paradox, since, although by appearance appear-ance and perfume the most tropical of blossoms, she Is yet by nativity a flower flow-er of north-temperato latitudes. Her habitat Is bounded north and south, roughly speaking, by the twentieth and the seventieth parallely. She grows wild all over Europe,' in Africa as low as Abyssinia., in Asia to and through India, and In North America to the edge of Mexico. Most wild roses are single, yet Pliny mentions double ones among them the Hundred-leaf. and - Herodotus says: !'Macedonia has gardeny of Midas, with ios-es' of sixty petals breathing out a delightful perfume." Whoever has read Roman history must recall the roses of Paestum, which bloomed twice a year. Notwithstanding this, Rome's favorite rose was the Hundred-leaf. It followed the eagles and the legions wherever they went, and grows, today, over three parts of the Roman world, a vital record rec-ord of that old-time occupation. Etymologically, "rose" Is from the Celtic rhodd or rhudd, "red," also the root of "ruddy." The Greek name, rhodon, has the same meaning. So have most rose names, in any language. Bo-tantlcally, Bo-tantlcally, the flower gives name to tho great natural order rosacea. Artificially, It Is classed under polygonii the many-angled. many-angled. The wild forms have alwajs fleshy, urn, or pitcher-shaped calxes, twenty or more 3tamens, five petals, and five sepals. The sepals show a bit of nature's most cunning work. Two of them are bearded at both edges, two without beards, and the fifth beard ;d at one edge and straight along the other. Thus they Inclose the bud with a bearded beard-ed overlap along every seam, good to repel re-pel moisture and to put to rout every intrusive creeping thing. R03e culture's beginning goes back beyond be-yond records. The flower is mentioned in tho earliest Coptic manuscripts India's In-dia's traditions take the rose to the times of the gods on earth. Egypt had roses, wild and tame, before the Roman occupation made it, in a way, Rome's commercial rose garden; yet. curiously enough, there Is no reference to the flower in painting, sculpture, or hieroglyphics. hiero-glyphics. Japan, in our time, parallels Egypt. Roses flourish there but do not serve as a motif for artists. There Is this further likeness neither Egypt nor Japan has a rose song, or a love song proper so it may well be that madam, the rose, Is avenged for the slight. The Jews, returning from the Babylonish Baby-lonish captivity, took with them a recompense re-compense of roses. Semiramis, with the world at her feet, found her chief Joy In a bower of roses. Mahomet turned back from Damascus, after viewing it encircled en-circled with rose gardens. "It Is too delightful. de-lightful. A man can have but one paradise," par-adise," said the prophet. Damascus lies in the heart of Syria, whose- name some geographers .derive from serl, meaning a wild rose, and wild roses are abundant there, The damask roses of our gardens gar-dens go back to Damascus. They were brought from it at the time of the Crusadesalthough Cru-sadesalthough exactly when, or by whom, nobody can certainly say. Martha Mar-tha McCulloch-WIlliams, in Success.