"ROSES ALL THE WAY"

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23791, 19 October 1940, Page 12 (Supplement)

"ROSES ALL THE WAY"

/-j-i HE rose, it. has been said, is | an index to civilisation. Borne on the crests of migrations and spread by trade, culture and religion, it has an ancestry that is as mixed as the nations who welcome the flower.

Roses bave lioen woven into the tapestries of Persia, carried in ecclesiastical ceremonies in medieval days, and sung by the poets down through the ages. In one of the earliest poems, in praise of the rose, written in the fifth century 8.C., extols its virtues:—

I sin? of Spring, flower-crowned. I sins the praises of the Rose— Friend, aid nie in my souff. The Rose is the perfume of the Gods, the

ioy of men, It adorns the, Graces at the blossoming of Love, It U the favoured flower ot Yenni,

The Rose revives the sick and embalms It defies the hand of time and' is lovely. .1® its old use, As it keeps for ever its first perfume. Officers of the East India Company in the seventeenth century introduce to England China and Tea Roses ' ro the East. From then on, the centre o rose culture was "Western Europe, wncr patient hvbridisers in Great 'Bntai i France, Spain and Germany oroS ® these introductions with indjgcN. species and succeeded in producing large-flowered HybritLTea group- . Botanists long have been at varia as to the total of species ' n . °r ronl genus, the number being stated at 30 anywhere up to 4266 s P eCie3 rrj 10 Europe and Western Asia alone. majority of. botanists recognise species. In 22 years of accurate reporting oil the 0 American l!ose Society, o\ varieties of roses have been annual average of 153. -J, —From tbo New ■Jori'®® 4 ®'