12 The Rose. 



The Rose. 



The Rose has been known from time immemorial, so that it 

 is impossible to discover its native country. The word is de- 

 rived from the Greek, rodon, red ; from whence comes Rosa, 

 Latin, and Rose, English. In the Sylva Florifera, is an account 

 of its birth. " Flora having found the corpse of a favorite nymph, 

 whose beauty of person was only surpassed by the chastity of 

 her mind and purity of her heart, resolved to raise a plant from 

 the precious remains of this daughter of the Dryads, for which pur- 

 pose she begged the assistance of Venus and the Graces, as well 

 as of the deities that preside over gardens, to assist in the trans- 

 formation of the nymph into a flower that was to be by them 

 proclaimed queen of all the vegetable beauties. The ceremony 

 was attended by the zephyrs, who cleared the atmosphere, 

 in order that Apollo might bless the new created progeny with 

 his beams. Bacchus supplied rivers of nectar to nourish it ; 

 and Vertumnus poured his choicest perfumes over the plant. 

 When the metamorphosis was complete, Pomona strewed her 

 fruit over the young branches, which were then crowned by Flora 

 with a diadem that had been purposely prepared by the Celes- 

 tials to distinguish this queen of flowers." There are many other 

 narratives of its creation, enough perhaps to satisfy the mind as to 

 the origin of the thousand varieties we are at present acquainted 

 with. This genus presents every gradation of form, size, and 

 fulness, and every shade of color, as even a blue and black have 

 been produced by our florists. The Persian Rose grows thirty 

 feet high ; Lady Banks, twenty feet ; the common Dog Rose 

 twelve feet ; and so on, down to the smaller kinds, which real- 

 ize the saying, of the rarest essences being contained in the 

 smallest caskets, by their superior beauty and fragrance. As it 

 has more than ten stamens growing upon the calyx, it belongs 

 to the 11th class, Icosandria (twenty husbands), and the pistils 

 numbering more than ten, to the 13th order, Polygamia (many 

 wives). The genus is characterized by the calyx being in the 

 form of a pitcher, or urceolate, contracted at its orifice and ter- 

 minated above in a five-cleft border, deciduous or falling off in 

 the usual season. The five petals are remarkable for their great 



