Features
Come on a journey into the sweet-smelling world of roses. Read about their part in the most famous war of the 15th century, the poems they have inspired, and how new varieties are created.
Rose Breeding
Fossil records show us the roses we grow in our gardens are the result of an amazing 35 million years of change. Today the flower is still evolving, but mainly due to rose breeding – the crossing of two different parent flowers to make a rose with new characteristics.
The Wars of the Roses
To associate anything as beautiful as a rose with something as bloody as war, particularly civil war, seems to be a fundamental mistake; however, the series of conflicts in England between 1455 and 1485 has come to be known as the Wars of the Roses.
The Rose in English Poetry (16th-18th century)
The rose is one of the most widely used symbolic devices in English literature. It stands primarily for love, for love’s passion and beauty, for its constancy and simultaneously its perishability.
The Rose in English Poetry (19th-20th century)
Including the work of Keats, Oppenheim and DH Lawrence
Ten Things…
Think you're a rose expert? Test yourself with these facts for the green-fingered…
