786 ARBORETUM AND FRUTICETUM. PART III. 
Taessa was particularly celebrated for roses, and that he saw a great quantity 
of these flowers at Calicut. Sir John Chardin, in 1686, found the gardens ot 
the Persians without “ parterres, labyrinths, and other ornaments of Euro- 
pean gardens, but filled with lilies, peach trees, and roses; and all modern 
travellers bear testimony to the esteem in which the flower is held in the 
East. Sir William Ouseley tells us, in his T'ravels in Persia in 1819, that 
when he entered the flower-garden belonging to the governor of the castle 
near Fassa, he was overwhelmed with roses ; and Jackson, in his Journey, &c., 
says that the roses of the Sinan Nile, or Garden of the Nile, are unequalled ; 
and mattresses are made of their leaves for men of rank torecline on. Buck- 
ingham speaks of the rose plantations of Damascus, as occupying an area ot 
many acres about three miles from that city: but we have said so much on 
the gardens of Syria and Persia, and of the roses forming a conspicuous 
article of culture in them, in the historical part of our Encyclopedia of Gar- 
dening, that we shall not dwell on the subject here, farther than to give the 
following quotation from Sir Robert Ker Porter’s Travels : — 
“ On my first entering this bower of fairy land,’ says this gentleman, 
speaking of the garden of one of the royal palaces of Persia, “ I was struck 
with the appearance of two rose trees full 14 ft. high, laden with thousands of 
flowers, in every degree of expansion, and of a bloom and delicacy of scent 
that imbued the whole atmosphere with exquisite perfume. Indeed, I believe 
that in no country in the world does the rose grow in such perfection as in 
Persia; in no country is it so cultivated and prized by the natives. Their 
gardens and courts are crowded by its plants, their rooms ornamented with 
vases filled with its gathered branches, and every bath strewed with the full- 
blown flowers, plucked with the ever-replenished stems. .... . But, in this 
delicious garden of Negaaristan, the eye and the smell are not the only senses 
regaled by the presence of the rose: the ear is enchanted by the wild and 
beautiful notes of multitudes of nightingales, whose warblings seem to increase 
in melody and softness with the unfolding of their favourite flowers. Here, 
indeed, the stranger is more powerfully reminded that he is in the genuine 
country of the nightingale and the rose.” (Persia in Miniature, vol. iii.) 
At marriages and other festivities, in the middle ages, the guests wore 
chaplets of roses. The author of the romance of Perce Forest, describing 
an entertainment, says, “ Every person wore a chaplet of roses on his head. 
The constable of France, and, probably, other great officers at other courts, 
when he waited on the king at dinner, had one of these crowns. Women, 
when they took the veil, and when they married, were thus adorned. War- 
riors wore their helmets encircled with these flowers, as appears from their 
monumental figures. This fondness of our ancestors for this fragrant and 
elegant flower, and the various uses to which they applied it, explains a par- 
ticular, that, at first sight, seems somewhat whimsical, which is, the bushels of 
roses sometimes paid by vassals to their lords.” (Histoire de-la Vie Privée des 
Francais, vol. ii. p. 221.) 
In Britain, one of the earliest notices of the rose occurs in Chaucer, who 
wrote early in the thirteenth century; and in the beginning of the fifteenth 
century, as we have already noticed (p. 33.), there is evidence of the rose 
having been cultivated for commercial purposes; and of the water distilled 
from it being used to give a flavour to a variety of dishes, and to wash the 
hands at meals; a custom still preserved in some of our colleges, and also in 
many of the public halls within the city of London. } 
Among the new year’s gifts presented to Queen Mary in 1556, was a bottle 
of roose (rose) water, a loaf of sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg ( Nichol’s Illustra- 
tions, note by T. G. C.); and, in 1570, we find among the items in the account 
of a dinner of Lord Leycester, when he was chancellor of the University of 
Oxford, 3 0z. of rose-water. 
In an account of a grant by Richard Cox, Bishop of Ely, (18 Queen 
Elizabeth, 20th March, 1576,) to Christopher (afterwards Sir Christopher) 
Hatton, of great part of Ely House, Holborn, for twenty-one years, the 
