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 01 

 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 Travels 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 to recline on. Buck- 

 ingham speaks of the rose plantations of Damascus, as occupying an area 01 

 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 Encyclopaedia 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 Privee des 

 Francois, 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 ( Nicholas 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 oz. 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 



