I had rather be a canker in the hedge
Than a rose in his garden,
refers, of course, to the canker-rose. According to legend, the Crown of Thorns was made from the briers of this variety of rose.
[51] Act I, Scene III.
VARIEGATED ROSE (Rosa versicolor) of Shakespeare's plays is the curious bush which produces at the same time red roses, white roses, and roses of red mottled with white and of white mottled with red. The growth of the tree is stiff and erect and the flowers have a sweet scent. The rose is often called the "York and Lancaster." Parkinson says:
"This Rose in the form and order of the growing is nearest unto the ordinary Damask Rose both for stem, branch, leaf and flower, the difference consisting in this—that the flower (being of the same largeness and doubleness as the Damask Rose) hath the one half of it sometimes of a pale whitish color and the other half of a paler damask color than the ordinary. This happeneth so many times, and sometimes also the flower hath divers stripes and marks on it, one leaf white, or striped with white, and the other half blush, or striped with blush, sometimes all striped, or spotted over, and at other times little or no stripes, or marks, at all, as Nature listeth to play with varieties in this as in other flowers. Yet this I have observed, that the longer it abideth blown open to the sun, the paler and the fewer stripes, marks, or spots will be seen in it. The smell is of a weak Damask Rose scent."
This rose recalls the old song of a "Lover to His Lancastrian Mistress," on handing her a white rose:
If this fair rose offend thy sight,
Placed in thy bosom bare,
'T will blush to find itself less white,
And turn Lancastrian there,
But if thy ruby lip it spy,
As kiss it thou mayst deign,
With envy pale 'twill lose its dye,
And Yorkish turn again.
In his play of "King Henry VI," which passes during the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare introduces the noted scene in the Temple Garden, London, where the emblem of the Yorkists (a white rose) and that of the Lancastrians (a red rose) is chosen. Richard Plantagenet plucks a white rose and the Earl of Somerset a red rose from rose-bushes that are still growing and blooming in the same spot, as they did when Shakespeare imagined the scene in "King Henry VI."[52]