Passing the desk of a coworker this morning I saw a large vase of flowers - a spray of blood-red rose buds with a frothing of Gypsophila (baby's breath). The roses, needless to say, were those Cadillacs of the American florist industry -American Beauties. Taking a closer look at the bouquet I marveled at the stout thornless stems nearly as thick as my pinkie finger, and the perfectly sculpted buds. The stems were nearly two feet long and I didn't notice any place where a lateral branch had to be clipped off. In fact, if it weren't for the water in the vase I would have sworn the roses were plastic. They will actually open in a few days. But that is not what they are about. They are about being perfect buds. They were bred to be buds. When they do open the recipient of these symbols of love are apt to be disappointed since the flowers are rather scrawny compared to the grand promise of the buds. And of course they have no scent.
Maybe what most disappoints me about florist's roses is that they don't have most of what makes roses interesting. In fact, the florist's rose has been reduced to the least interesting and most ephemeral feature - it's puer-ness you might say (if you were a Jungian), or the eternal bud.
What interests me about roses is how many features they have and how different all those features can be. Even without the flower. There are the leaves which run the gamut of color from dark green to bright bronze and every shade of green in between. Some are glossy, as if they had each just been glazed with linseed oil. Others look like rumpled tissue paper. The stems also choose from a varied palette of near black to bright green. When first emerging they can be bright russet or pale bronze.
The thorns add more variety, sometimes huge and in other cases so small they appear more like a halo or dew on the branch. One variety of rose sports thorns so broad and large they essentially are the branch. The moss roses, on the other hand, exude a sticky resin that clings to the hair-like thorns creating the effect of pale green "moss" on the stems and buds. Thorns can curve up or down or stick straight out (often noticed by the gardener while pinned down by them).
Rose bush anatomy is complicated and also widely variable. Those florist's roses are grown on bodies whose only purpose is to produce those long sturdy stems. They have no shape to speak of. We are familiar with "climbers" and "shrub" and "standard" or tree roses. But try to fit a rose bush into some designated spot in your garden and you have to contend with height (2 feet to 20-something), width (ditto), and whether it grows in a column, or is vase-shaped, or "weeps" or fans out or grows like a giant bonzai.
Not to be overlooked are the hips. You could call them the winter bloom. Bright orange or red, bottle-shaped, oval, or berry-like they can be a little extra something, a lagniappe from nature, or the main show.
Finally, the flower. But here I have to stop before I go off on forms, colors, shapes, stamens, bosses, and bracts....
p.s. the "thorn" picture above came from this accomplished photographer's wonderful site
Posted by briggs at February 12, 2004 10:28 AM