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The Legend and Romance Behind the Rose
| Article
# : |
11016 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
1,616 Words |
| Author
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Eric Rosenthal
Eric Rosenthal is a free-lance writer living in New York
City. He writes for various national and international
publications. His expertise is in horticulture. |
Earth's garden has been graced with the beauty of roses since time immemorial. The oldest trace of what today remains our most cherished group of flowering plants is a fossilized imprint discovered in the Colorado wilds. Botanists judge that this ancient but unmistakable leaf unfurled over forty million years ago.
Wild species were first brought under cultivation by the Chinese about three thousand years before the birth of Christ. Roses became so popular in China that by the time of the Han dynasty, just before the Christian era, huge garden parks were devoted to them. Historical records indicate that the vast amounts of arable land allotted to roses actually threatened China's agricultural capabilities. In the interest of food production, a great many of the parks were dismantled by imperial decree.
The ancient Greeks referred to roses as the "queen of flowers." According to the lyric poet Anacreon, the original rose sprang from Venus' blushes when, bathing, she was observed by an appreciative Jupiter:
The gods beheld this brilliant birth,
And hailed the Rose, the boon of earth.
A more scientific account of the rose was provide in the third century B.C., by the great naturalist Theophrastus, who included useful tips on rose culture in his botanical masterwork Enquiry into Plants. Raising roses was an endeavor worthy even of Greek kings. Midas, who possessed the legendary golden touch, also possessed enough of a green thumb, or so it was said, to have nurtured a spectacular sixty-petaled rose in
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