She'll take the wild roses (2/14/05)

Today is Valentine’s Day. It is a day dedicated to cards, chocolate and roses. As the local card shop can attest, I like paper greetings as much as the next person. I can spend hours selecting just the right one. I usually enter the store with a specific purpose in mind. Then I leave with a half dozen cards when I intended to buy only one.

I will never turn down chocolate but I tend to prefer it to be plain rather than the fancy stuff that is packaged for the holiday. As we still have a supply of Girl Scout cookies we don’t need any chocolate for the time being.

That leaves roses. My husband and I have purchased many flowers over the years but never roses on Valentine’s Day. Those are the most overpriced waste of money there is. Florist roses are beautiful but have had all the fragrance bred out of them and as far as I’m concerned that defeats the entire purpose. Flowers are meant to smell as wonderful as they look. Give me an old-fashioned single rose that blooms once a year instead of a florist rose any day.

I looked up roses on aboutflowers.com and found out that archaeologists have recently discovered the fossilized remains of wild roses that are over 40 million years old. I’m amazed that they would last that long. The dried rose petals I have saved over the years will surely crumble into dust long before they get a chance to become fossils.

The site also said that Confucius had a 600-book library specifically on how to care for roses. I don’t need 600 books to tell me how to care for roses. My method is very simple. Buy a beautiful rose bush and put it in the ground. Enjoy it for a year until the grafted portion dies. Never get around to pulling out the root stock. Ignore my husband’s suggestions to cut the ugly thing down.

Enjoy the spectacular show and heavenly fragrance the following years for the few weeks it is in bloom. Take pictures to show people what a great rose gardener I am. Ignore suggestions to trim it after it finishes blooming. Tie it to the porch to keep it from attacking my husband whenever he mows the grass. What could be simpler?

The ancient Romans have a rather nasty tale about roses. The story goes that there was an incredibly beautiful maiden named Rhodanthe. Her beauty drew many zealous suitors who pursued her relentlessly. Exhausted by their pursuit, and not being able to take advantage of anti-stalking laws, Rhodanthe was forced to take refuge from these lusty guys in the temple of her friend Diana. At that time Diana had temples all over the place. Unfortunately, Diana became jealous. When the suitors broke down her temple gates to get near their beloved Rhodanthe she also became angry. She turned Rhodanthe into a rose and her suitors into thorns.

The moral of the story is “don’t make me jealous!”

Another Roman myth is that white roses grew where the tears of Venus fell as she mourned the loss of her beloved Adonis. Yet another legend says that Venus' son Cupid accidentally shot arrows into the rose garden. My guess is that this was after the Diana mishap. It was the sting of the arrows that caused the roses to grow thorns. Venus walked through the garden and pricked her foot on a thorn because she didn’t have sense enough to wear shoes. It was the droplets of her blood which turned the roses red. I haven’t found any stories about where yellow roses came from.

The origin doesn’t really matter. All that counts is that millions of beautiful roses will grace the homes of loved ones on this Valentine’s Day. Personally I’d rather wait until the wild rose blooms in the front yard. It is even more gorgeous than florist roses. It smells like heaven on earth instead of the inside of a refrigerator. Better yet, the weather will be warm by then.

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