Book review: By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose
By Simon Morley
The rose enjoys unrivalled popularity among flowers around the world. It is much more than a flower with a multitude of meanings and is almost always present at life’s key moments from weddings to graduations, funerals and births. While romance is central today to the meaning of roses, art historian, amateur gardener and author Simon Morley notes in By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose, that across history the rose has been a symbol of many things, often irreconcilable: of mortality, of immortality, of virginity and of decadence.
Cultivated in the Middle East and Asia for more than two thousand years for its pleasing scent and medicinal properties, roses have become arguably the most loved flower across numerous cultures and religions. The romantic side of the rose is well known through numerous poems, books, plays films and Shakespeare’s sonnets and it is this aspect that is key to the thriving global flower trade. As a flower, the rose today is no longer the few species it once was and is now represented by a vast array of brightly coloured species and hybrids with blooms more influenced by us than by nature.
“Like the apple, the rose has become a logo—in contemporary culture, for romantic love”.
In this book Morley looks to organize the social history of the Rose via a series of chapters based around a central idea such as “Love and the Rose,” “Death and the Rose,” “Eastern Roses go West” and “The Rose Business.” And while the book does make the association of roses with Islam and the cultivation and rise of roses from China, the book for the most part focuses on the history of roses through the eyes of western civilization dating back to Ancient Rome and Greece.
For the Romans and Greeks, the rose initially was closely associated with erotic symbolism and this aspect ultimately led to roses being viewed as a pagan symbol in the early Christian era. However, over time, Morley notes that the rose progressively came to be associated with a number of Christian spiritual aspects: with martyrdom, with the Sacred Heart of Christ, and especially, with the Virgin Mary. She was “the rose of heaven,” the “never-wilting rose” with the most well-known Marian devotion being the rosary. (Note: in Middle English, Morley explains, “rosary” simply meant “rose-garden.”)
The secular strain of symbolism never went away and Morley finds that Pagan eroticism through Shakespeare and his contemporaries and that romantic rose imagery was commonplace. Rose imagery became more prevalent with the rise of the artistic and philosophical movement known as Romanticism. And according to Morley, the Romantics employed the rose not as a symbol of any particular concept but as a symbol of the natural world and the interplay of sacred and pagan meanings became a common theme among poets and artists through to the modern era.
Around the same time 19th-century horticulturalists were embracing the rose garden and bringing together varieties from around the world. Gardeners in England and France pursued a project of crossing European “ramblers,” which bloomed just once a summer, with “repeaters”, colourful varieties with minimal scent imported from China. These China sourced roses had a significant capability called “remontancy” which meant that they could bloom repeatedly throughout the summer, not merely in spring (or May in England) as European varieties did.
The result of this project was the creation of the hybrid tea rose, a general classification including the qualities we associate with those with Valentine’s Day bouquets—a “high-cantered,” inverted-cup shape, with deeply coloured petals and a long stem. Today roses like these are mass produced in greenhouses year-round and efficiently shipped across the globe. Morley observes that “most of the roses grown today, and pretty much all the roses we give as cut roses, are significantly different in appearance from all European roses in existence prior to this period.”
Morley takes this further and explores the notion that there is a co-evolutionary aspect at play—the rose “made” itself attractive to humans in order to propagate as widely as possible. Ultimately, Morley asks the question: is the rose of the Romans and Shakespeare really the rose we know today? The rose bud that bloomed so beautifully and briefly created an obsession—and in time an industry—that ultimately fundamentally altered the flower. So, is a rose still a rose? Afterall, as Morley, cites in his book title quotation, when Juliet speaks of Romeo, she says nothing about appearances but simply that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Simon Morley is a British artist and art historian. He is the author of several books and catalogue essays on modern and contemporary art, and his art reviews and essays have been published in numerous magazines and journals. Previously a lecturer at the Sotheby's Institute and at Winchester School of Art, he is now Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Dankook University, Republic of Korea. He is also a keen rose gardener.
By Any other Name promised a lot. Morley’s concept and approach is compelling and his well-crafted chapters and weaving together of facts and nuggets made for an interesting read. Unfortunately, in parts it was rather dry and occasionally rambling, and could have benefited from tighter editing. Definitely worth a read for those interested in the history of roses and more broadly for dedicated readers interested in social history.
Black Teal Books Rating: 7 / 10
