(Rosa spp.)
Roses are one of the most beloved and cherished of all the flowers, and certainly the best known.
When most people think of a rose, they imagine the multi-petalled florettes that adorn gardens and bouquets, bred for their beauty and scent. But the comparatively understated wild rose that still adorns our hedgerows is as worthy of our love and attention - both for her delicate flowers and her tasty, nutritious rosehips. Even her thorns have something to teach us about integrating pain and setting boundaries.
Our culture focuses on the lighter side of the rose: It's the flower of romance and valentine's day. The terms ' it's all rosy' or 'rose tinted glasses' insinuate a naivity or surface level positivity. But the wild rose is a complex being, with a deep historical relationship with humans. When you dig deeper you find that they are entwined with all affairs of the heart: Passion, but also healing pain. Connection, but also protection. Comfort, but also feeling your grief.
In this blog, I'll explore;
Rose Identification
The rose gives its name to the Rosaceae family, which includes brambles, cherries, pear, plums, apples, and lots of other delicious fruit. This family is generally identified by having five petals and numerous stamens, often with oval, serrated leaves. The petals are separate and the stamens are distinctive but the centre often looks 'bushy'.
Roses themselves contain compound sets of 5-7 leaflets and after flowering their fruit takes the form of hips which do have little irritating hairs if broken open (used by children as itching powder in olden times).
While many hybridised and specifically bred roses have numerous petals, this isn't how the plant appears in the wild where it has a delicate five petalled aesthetic. There are many types of wild rose in the UK, including the dog rose, sweet briar and rose burnet - and they can all be used interchangeably. Though interestingly, any rose (even commercial ones) is edible so long as it is pesticide free.
History & Mythology of the Rose
The very fact that there are thousands of rose species, many of them developed by humans, is testament to our deep and enduring relationship with this special plant -- which made its way into our hearts thousands of years ago and still occupies a significant cultural place even if we sometimes forget that it is so much more than a valentine's day flower. So in many ways, I like to think of the rose as the perfect emblem of our symbiotic relationship with nature.
Roses were pictured on frescoes at the Minoan palace at Knosos in Crete 4,000 years ago, which is pretty mind blowing (picture below, source Simon Morley's blog). They look like a type of wild rose, single petalled - though it's not clear if they are cultivated or growing in the wild.
Association with love: Aphrodite & Adonis
The rose came to symbolise love for the ancient Greeks and Romans - an association that has endured over the ages.
Throughout the years it has been associated with the tragic love story of Adonis (a mortal) and Aphrodite (a goddess). He was fatally wounded by a wild boar during a hunt. She rushed to his side, but was too late to save him. As she ran to him, she cut her feet on thorns, and her blood mingled with his on the ground. From the mingling of their blood, it is said that the first red roses grew, stained by their love and grief.
This complex role of the rose as a symbol of love continued throughout the ages. Shakespeare himself had Juliet, his famous star cross'd lover Juliet "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet", when justifying that her Romeo should not be tainted because his name was Montague. Of course, the sweet smell of the rose and its impact on humans cannot be understated. The unspoken nuance in this sentence, however, is surely that like love, like the rose, can be beautiful, sweet and comforting; but it it also comes with thorns which can be painful and cut deep.
Light and Dark: Aurora and Sleeping Beauty
In ancient mythology, the flower was dedicated to Aurora, the goddess of the dawn - a time of day naturally bestowed in the same colours as roses. Below she is pictured in the 19th Century painting "Aurora Triumphans", where she is shown as the dawn, covered in roses (bottom right), having vanquished the darkness (bottom left) (picture credit - wikipedia). While she brings the light, her existance is predicated on emerging from the dark. She is the integration of both - a transient place between night and day.
This association appears in the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, where the princess is known both as 'Briar Rose' (representing a more earthly presence, guarded by thorns), and the more regal Aurora (representing awakening, or renewal) -- each name representing different parts of the princess's life and arguably her psyche.
The name 'Briar rose' actually dates to the Grimm's version of the fairy tale (1812), whereas Aurora is used in the later Tschaikovsky Ballet (1890). Disney brought the two together in what I think is a beautiful combination that represents both earthly and celestial aspects of this character's journey.
The rose in this context doesn't just symbolise love, soothing scent and enduring passion - she is also a thorny guardian of the hedgerow - a liminal boundary between two worlds. From a Jungian perspective, the briars surrounding the sleeping princess could be seen to symbolize the psychological defenses and obstacles that protect the self (or psyche) during a period of dormancy or transformation.
These thorny barriers could be seen to represent the trials we must navigate to reach a deeper connection with the unconscious and achieve personal growth. Only when this process was done would the thorned bushes allow the allegorical prince through to unlock a period of wakefulness, a new dawn as it were.[3]
So, so we see that the representation of the rose is not not just one of a 'rose tinted' romantic love, but also intwined with deeper conflilcts of the soul. Her thorns could be seen to be protective, but also as wound inflicting - keeping others out, or representing suffering on the journey to self-actualisation.
No image represents this more poignantly than that of blood falling from Christ's crown made of thorns of roses as he was crucified - which was said to have caused roses to spring up when the blood touched the ground.
What is clear is that when it comes to the rose, passions run deep.
Oldest living rose
The known oldest living rose bush is a dog rose over 1,000 years old and it also has a fascinating story.
It grows at a Cathedral in Hildesheim, and is tied to a legend surrounding Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious. In 815, he got separated from his entourage during a hunt and ended up lost and alone, swimming across a river until he reached a mound dedicated to the Saxon Goddess, Hulda, and covered in wild rose (her symbol). He had some relics with him and prayed to the virgin Mary that he would be found and saved.
When he woke, the mound was covered with glittering white snow despite it being the middle of summer. The bush was in full bloom, the grass was lush and the trees were covered in leaves. He looked for his reliquary and saw it was covered in ice between the branches of the rose-bush.
Some might say he was suffering from hypthermia following a swim in an icy river, but he took it all to be a sign that Hulda - who was a protector of women's crafts but also associated with Wilderness and winter - wanted the Virgin to be worshipped in her place.
So, naturally, the emperor he pledged that he would construct a cathedral to honour the Virgin where the mound with the rose was. He spared the rose, and built the cathedral in a way that the rose is growing now behind the altar in the apse. Its stem is now a foot thick! (for more on this incredible rose bush see Wikipedia)
I like to think that Hulda and her spirirt endured, through this thousand year old rose, as the perfect symbol of wilderness enduring in relationship with humans. Her blooms may delicately flower each year, but having lived that long she is clearly strong, robust, and not to be underestimated.
Using Rose Medicinally
Understanding the history and mythology of the rose also puts its medicinal use in context. It is certainly used to help with emotional suffering, grief and anxiety, which is unsurprising.
I certainly know it helps to calm me when I'm feeling anxious. Currently in the third trimester of my pregnancy, I have taken to burning a rose candle while having a bath and listening to my hypnobirthing affirmations, and it's the most soothing experience - not in small part due to the scent of the candle.
The rose is also an incredibly medicinal plant, being astringent, anti-inflammatory, diuretic, and sedative. It can be used to treat PMS, colds, flu, sore throats, diarrhoea, skin and joint health and arthiritis! [2].
Foraging Rose
Wild roses are abundant along our hedgerows. Rose petals are edible, but it's the nutrient rich rosehip that I forage the most. They last from early autumn right into the winter, which is quite a long season compared to other fruits. You can actually eat them off the bush just be careful not to take in any of the itchy hairs in the middle as that would not be fun.
They are renown for being very rich in Vitamin C -apparently containing 20 times the amount found in oranges! I also love to use them for decorative purposes, particularly around Christmas time.
1) Rosehip Syrup
Its most common use is is in Rosehip Syrup, and it was famously foraged for this use during World War 2, when the Ministry of Food recommended its consumption. A national week for collecting rosehips was announced and in 1941 this led to a 200 ton collection of hips to make 600,000 bottles of syrup!
There are loads of recipes for rosehip syrup online but for a simple version, try this:
Cover your rosehips with water in a saucepan and bring to the boil
Mash them
Strain through a muslin (very important because of the itchy hairs)
Measure how many mililitres of liquid you have then add an equivalent in grams of sugar (so 200ml of liquid, add 200g of syrup).
Warm until the sugar is dissolved then store in a sterilised bottle
2) Hip and Haw Ketchup
I highly recommend trying out this recipe for hip and haw ketchup from the Handmade Apothecary.
3) Foraged wreath
As well as being tasty and nutritious Rosehips are great used decoratively - I find that they do last longer than other berries even if they do eventually go mushy. This is a foraged wreath I made last year, where rosehips were a central feature.
Click here for a reel on this wreath.
How Rose Supports Biodiversity
Like all native species, wild roses support an amazing amount of biodiversity.
One of my favourite examples of this is the rose gall, or Robin's Pin Cushion - photographed below. Here, the gall wasp lays up to 60 eggs within a leaf bud, and causes a chemical distortion that causes this woody, mossy like structure to grow on the rose. It's comprised of lots of chambers where the wasp grubs live.
Imagine calling a rose bush your home, I can hardly blame them!
It's a beautiful image of symbiosis as the process is totally harmles to the rose plant itself - as you can see below, rosehips continue to grow quite happily on the same plant. For more info on this process, see this RHS article.
Concluding thoughts
My exploration of the rose has ended up being so much more than I had expected when I started this blog. I admit that I was always intrigued by what the wild rose could show us in contrast to the more culturally prevalent and hybridised multi-petalled rose.
But what I wasn't expecting to find was this deep, and slightly dark historical associations whereby the rose can help us integrate both our love and the necessary pain that comes with it. How it can represent our own journey towards actualisation of the soul, uncorporating both the protective and pain inflicting thorns as well as sweet scented petals and nutritious rosehips.
I encourage you when incorporating rose into your life, whether through a beautiful smelling bouquet, making rosehip syrup or perhaps a Christmas wreath, to think about this complex history of connotations. Let her into your heart, and I have a feeling she'll not only bring you warmth and pleasure but also profound healing.
Let me know below of any experiences you've had with rose, and if any of the thoughts in this blog have resonated with you by leaving a comment.
Sources & Further reading
[1] Britain's Wild Flowers, by Rosamond Richardson
[2] The Handmade Apothecary, Vicky Chown and Kim Walker
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