Rose
Rosa spp.
A wild rose can look surprisingly unlike the flowers that usually fill florist windows. Five broad petals surround a conspicuous centre of yellow stamens, with little attempt to hide the working parts of the flower. Later, the petals fall and a hip begins swelling in their place.
Cultivation has taken that fairly simple arrangement in almost every direction imaginable. Roses have been selected for more petals, stronger fragrance, repeat flowering, unusual colours and particular growth habits until some modern blooms barely resemble their wild relatives. Yet the older structure is still underneath it all.
There isn't really one rose. Rosa is an entire genus, and people have spent centuries making it even more complicated.
Classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Family: Rosaceae
Genus: Rosa
Species: More than 150 recognised species, alongside thousands of cultivated varieties
Common Names: Rose, Wild Rose, Garden Rose, Briar Rose (species dependent)
Plant Form: Shrubs and climbing or scrambling woody plants
Material: Flowers and flower buds
Five Petals Became Hundreds
Many wild roses begin with a structure that's remarkably easy to read. Five petals surround numerous stamens, leaving pollen readily accessible to visiting insects.
Double flowers complicate things.
Over generations of cultivation, people repeatedly selected roses in which reproductive structures developed as additional petal like forms. The result ranges from semi double flowers with their centres still visible to densely packed blooms containing so many petals that it's difficult to see where one layer ends and another begins.
Colour received similar attention. White, cream, yellow, apricot, pink and deep crimson all occur across cultivated roses, with countless shades between them. Fragrance can be equally variable. One plant may announce itself from several steps away while another produces a spectacular flower with very little scent at all.
Selective breeding didn't simply give us more roses. It changed what a rose flower could look like.
Prickles, Not Thorns
Rose stems are famous for their thorns.
Botanically, they're usually prickles.
A true thorn develops from modified stem tissue and has a deeper structural connection with the branch. Rose prickles arise from the outer tissues instead, which is why they can sometimes be snapped away relatively cleanly.
The distinction is unlikely to feel particularly important when one catches your sleeve.
Those prickles can help long arching or scrambling stems catch against surrounding vegetation, while the growth habit of Rosa varies considerably between species. Some remain compact shrubs. Others produce long canes capable of pushing through neighbouring plants or climbing over available support.
The leaves are usually divided into several toothed leaflets, making a rose recognisable even when there isn't a flower anywhere in sight.
From Petal to Hip
Once a rose has been pollinated, the petals eventually fall and another part of the plant becomes much more noticeable.
The rose hip develops from the flower's receptacle, which enlarges around the true fruits inside. Those small hard structures are achenes, each containing a seed. So the bright red or orange object commonly called the fruit is actually holding several individual fruits within it.
Hips begin green before ripening through orange, scarlet, red or darker colours depending on the species. Birds and other animals may feed on them, helping move seeds away from the parent plant.
For roses that flower only once each year, leaving spent flowers in place allows this second display to develop. The plant moves from petals to hips rather than simply becoming a flowerless shrub.
A rose doesn't stop being interesting when it finishes blooming.
Wild Before the Garden
Wild Rosa species occur naturally across much of the Northern Hemisphere, including Europe, Asia, North America and parts of North Africa.
With that enormous range comes considerable variety in habitat. Roses grow along woodland margins and riverbanks, through grasslands and open scrub, across rocky ground and into mountainous country. Some tolerate cold, exposure and poor soils that seem rather removed from the carefully tended rose bed.
Cultivation carried the genus much further.
In Australia, roses have become familiar garden plants across temperate and cooler regions. Older plants sometimes survive where the gardens around them haven't. A rose beside an abandoned homestead may continue flowering and sending out new growth long after regular pruning, feeding and careful training disappeared.
Some cultivated roses are considerably tougher than their reputation suggests.
Flowers for Insects, Mostly
An open rose can be a busy place.
Bees, hoverflies, beetles and other insects visit accessible flowers, particularly those with exposed stamens. Single and semi double roses generally make reaching pollen much easier than heavily doubled cultivars, where extra petals may obscure or replace some reproductive structures.
That's one of the trade offs hidden inside a very full garden rose. The flower people selected for its extraordinary number of petals may offer less to a pollen seeking insect than its simpler relative nearby.
Flowering time varies with species, cultivar and climate. Across much of temperate Australia, garden roses begin flowering in spring, while repeat flowering cultivars can produce further flushes through summer and into autumn. Many wild species and older garden roses are less generous with encores and produce one main display each year.
Then the hips get their turn.
A Flower People Kept Changing
People have been cultivating roses for thousands of years, and beauty was only part of the attraction.
Fragrant petals have been distilled for rose water and rose oil, dried for aromatic preparations and incorporated into food, perfume and ceremony. Rose hips from suitable species have also been collected and used as food.
Some regions became particularly associated with growing highly fragrant roses for distillation. Producing rose oil requires a remarkable amount of floral material, so fields of flowers may ultimately become a comparatively tiny quantity of aromatic oil.
Cultivation also became an exercise in preference. People selected roses for fragrance, colour and flower shape, then for qualities such as repeat flowering, disease resistance and particular growth habits. Breeders crossed lineages from different regions, creating increasingly complicated garden ancestry.
Thousands of cultivars later, we've become very good at persuading roses to look the way we want.
Love Wasn't the Only Association
Rose symbolism is so strongly tied to love that it's easy for everything else to disappear behind it.
Different cultures and periods have connected roses with beauty, secrecy, mortality, devotion and religious symbolism as well as romance. Particular colours later acquired their own meanings, although those associations have never been completely universal or fixed.
Contemporary folk and metaphysical practice continues to use rose in work concerned with love, affection and attraction, but also self regard, reconciliation and emotional matters more broadly.
The plant itself offers plenty of material for those interpretations. A rose can be fragrant and soft petalled while growing from woody stems armed with prickles. It flowers briefly, then replaces the bloom with a hip.
People have been making something of those contrasts for a very long time.
In the Apotheca
Drying catches a rose somewhere between flower and memory of one.
Fresh petals lose their softness and become thin and papery. Pink may deepen, pale colours can fade towards cream or brown, and the fragrance changes as the volatile compounds gradually diminish.
Whole buds preserve something different. Their petals remain compressed together, with sepals still gathered around the base and the eventual shape of the flower folded into a space small enough to sit on a fingertip.
It's a stage that's easy to miss on a living plant because everyone waits for the flower to open.
In a jar of dried buds, that's the part that remains.
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