National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Rose


 * The Rose
 * The Wild Rose
 * The Wild Prairie Rose

The Rose
Four States consider the rose, in one form or another, their emblematic flower. New York school children adopted the rose without any adjective limiting the selection. Georgia, by legislative resolution, considers the Cherokee rose as her flower. Iowa, by the same method of choice, made the wild rose hers. North Dakota's legislature selected the wild prairie rose for that State.

The Cherokee rose, which has white petals and yellow stamens, was imported from China and is believed by botanists to be the one from which the Chinese developed the fragrant double Banksian roses.

Certain it is that from the standpoint of the florist, if not from the standpoint of general sentiment, the rose is our national flower. And yet the florist's rose, which delights milady's boudoir with its fragrance as well as with its beauty, is one of the most imperfect of flowers. To the wild flowers it is deformed, a freak, unable to fight its own way in the war of blossoms for place and position.

That busybody, man, who is always making flower and insect, plant and animal, all serve his purposes, went out and gathered some natural roses and started to make them over to meet his own ideals of beauty and fragrance. But how he did interfere with their perfection when he tried to magnify their beauty! He, in very fact, made them unfit for survival in the garden of Nature. No natural rose was ever such a poor seed-bearer as the American Beauty or Jacqueminot. Set these out to fight for themselves and they would disappear forever—for the more perfect the rose, from the flower-show standpoint, the more imperfect from a natural standpoint. And why? When the florist took this rose in hand he concluded it had too many stamens and not enough petals, so one by one he converted the stamens into petals, step by step he bred out of the flower the ability to set seed and bred into it the quality of looking handsome, until it is what we have today.

Other flowers, like the lotus of Egypt, the chrysanthemum of Japan, come and go, but still the rose is queen of the flower world. That maiden of ancient civilization who sang of it as being full of love, the servant of Aphrodite, cradling itself on its nodding stalk and playing with the smiling zephyrs which kiss it as they pass, beautifully expressed what many a modern admirer of the rose has felt.

Again, the rose is as famous in legend and history as for its beauty and fragrance.

For three hundred years the youngest peer of France, on the first day of May, brought to the court in an elaborate silver bowl the annual tribute of roses. In Egypt mattresses for the wealthy were made from the flowers' sundried petals. The Romans placed them at the entrance of the banquet hall when the things which transpired within were not to be mentioned without; hence our “sub rosa.” In China roses play an important part in funeral rites, and in some parts of Europe girls prick their fingers, extract a drop of blood, and bury it under a rose bush to insure the color in their cheeks.

Then there is the commercial side of rose culture. It is said that there are more than 100,000,000 of the cut blossoms sold annually in the United States. Many new varieties are propagated each year. One European collector, trying to keep pace with the constant additions to the list, has gathered 4,200 different kinds and still finds his collection incomplete.

How long it has been since man first learned to develop new qualities in the rose is not known. That the Romans knew the secret of flower breeding is certain. And it appears that perhaps in even more remote time the Japanese and Chinese gardeners were crossing varieties and producing hybrid species. The trade in attar of roses has been hard hit by the war, and many are the hands that once labored to delight the world with the bottled fragrance of the rose, but which now work to produce the death-dealing thunderbolts. It requires ten tons of rose petals to make a pound of the attar—20,000 pounds concentrated into one! A pound of this luxurious perfume is worth $200.

The Wild Rose (Rosa carolina L.; Rosa humilis Marsh.)


There is nothing about the simple loveliness of the wild rose to suggest that she is a queen who has never come into her own; yet, as the original from which all the reigning beauties of the rose-fancier's garden and the florist's window have been developed, royal honors are her due. She resembles rather a little flower princess too fragile to brave the dangers of rocky hillsides or meadows close to busy highways. However, Nature has provided this seeming innocent with arms for protection and wiles for perpetuation.

Sharp downward-turning prickles discourage cattle from eating the foliage and prevent the field mice from climbing the stems to steal the fruit in the autumn, when the hips, or berries, are ripe. These prickles also help the plant to hold its position when it grows on the side of a bank.

The delicate fragrance of the usually solitary pink blossoms, and the solid center of bright yellow stamens, rich with pollen, attract a variety of insects. Bumblebees, requiring a firmer support than the petals would give, alight directly on the center of the flower, so that pollen from other flowers is likely to reach the pistil. Occasionally self-fertilization takes place in a simply constructed blossom which yields abundant pollen.

“The wild rose never outstays St. Mary Magdalen,” is a fairly true English saying, for her day, July 22d, generally ends its season. Each delicate flower has about two days of life. During rainy weather the petals fold over the green stigmas and the yellow stamens to protect them from moisture. The blossom closes with the last rays of daylight and reopens as the sun dispels the darkness, so that only the careful observer and the early riser realize that it “draws the drapery of its couch about it and lies down to pleasant dreams.” It is true that some wild roses may be found open at night, but these are the ones whose seeds are fertilized and whose pollen is carried off, so that rain and dew are no longer to be feared.

The bright red “hips” have a pleasant flavor, but their outer covering irritates the throat, and today they are left for wild things to eat. Old writers refer to them as highly esteemed delicacies. “Children with great delight eat the berries thereof when they are ripe, and make chaines and other pretty geegaws of the fruit: cookes and gentlewomen make tarts and suchlike dishes for pleasure,” testifies one. We are rich enough in more luscious fruit today to forego this doubtful dainty. The “hip” is designed to tempt the birds, which sometimes drop the seeds it contains miles away from the mother plant.

Large swellings or galls are frequently found on the rose bush. “Robin's Cushions,” the country people call them, although they have nothing to relate them to the robin except a somewhat reddish color. Their origin is found in a kind of wasp—the rose-gall—which punctures a bud and lays its eggs inside. Numerous larvæ are hatched and later creep into the leaf tissue, while the bud swells into a gall. The taste of these objects is sufficiently unpleasant to have gained for them a reputation for medicinal virtue in earlier days.

The choice of the wild rose, by common consent, as the State flower of Iowa is only one of many tributes to it. English poetry breathes its fragrance in many pretty verses. The scenes of Scott's “Lady of the Lake” are profuse with “wild rose, eglantine, and broom.” Yet so elusive is the charm of this blossom's simplicity that it remained for a great American composer to express it most truly in the wistful sweetness of music.

The Wild Prairie Rose (Rosa blanda)
North Dakota's floral queen is the species known to botanists as Rosa blanda; to others by various names in different localities. Ranging from Newfoundland to New Jersey and westward to where the Rocky Mountains cut off its march toward the land of the setting sun, it is known here as the “smooth,” there as the “early,” and elsewhere as the “meadow.” It is indeed a bland rose, for usually it is entirely unarmed, with neither true thorn nor bark-attached prickle to defend itself. Now and then it may possess a few weak prickles as a sort of family crest or to show its friendliness with its thorny relatives. Its flowers are a trifle larger than those of the climbing rose and change from pink to pure white.

The wild rose has many relatives. Among these are the strawberry, with its tufted stem, the cinquefoils, with their creeping traits, the spikelike burnett and agrimony, the scrambling blackberries and raspberries, the blackthorn and the hawthorn, the cherry, the mountain ash, the apple and the pear—every variety of size and shape and style, from the lowly creeper to the big spreading tree, within the limits of a single flower family.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 492–493. (Illustration from page 506.)