Many a yellow quince was there
Piled upon the regal chair,
Many a verdant myrtle-bough,
Many a rose-crown featly wreathed,
With twisted violets that grow
Where the breath of spring has breathed.
Homer,[[1276]] too, it is evident, was familiar with the rose, to whose fragrant petals he compares the fingers of the morning, and not, as has been imagined, to the blood-red flower of the wild pomegranate tree.[[1277]]
According, moreover, to a tradition preserved to later times, the seasons of the year, which in remote antiquity were but three, they symbolically represented by a rose, an ear of corn, and an apple.[[1278]] This division is thought to have been borrowed from the Egyptians, in whose country, however, the apple was never sufficiently naturalised to be taken as an emblem of one of the seasons of the year.
But, at whatever period the rose began to be cultivated, it evidently, as soon as known, shared with the violet the admiration of the Athenian people, whose extensive plantations of this most fragrant shrub recall to mind the rose gardens of the Fayoum, or Serinaghur. The secret, moreover, was early discovered of hastening or retarding their maturity, so as to obtain an abundant supply through every month in the year.[[1279]] Occasionally, too, numbers of rosebuds were laid among green barleystalks, plucked up by the roots, in unglazed amphoræ, to be brought forth and made to blow when wanted. Others deposited them between layers of the same material on the ground, or dipped them in the liquid dregs of olives. Another mode of preserving the rose was exceedingly curious,—cutting off the top of a large standing reed, and splitting it down a little way, they inserted a number of rosebuds in the hollow, and then bound it softly round and atop with papyrus in order to prevent their fragrance from exhaling.[[1280]] How many varieties of this flower[[1281]] were possessed by the ancients it is now, perhaps, impossible to determine; but they were acquainted with the common, the white, and the moss rose, the last, in Aristotle’s[[1282]] opinion, the sweetest, together with the rose of a hundred leaves,[[1283]] celebrated by the Persian poets. Even the wild rose was not wholly inodorous in Greece.[[1284]] Roses were artificially blanched by being exposed while unfolding to powerful and repeated fumigations with sulphur.[[1285]] The roses which grew on a dry soil were supposed to be the sweetest, while their fragrance was augmented by planting garlic near the root.[[1286]] To cause them to bloom in January, or in early spring (for even in the most southern parts of Greece the rose season only commences in April)[[1287]] various means were resorted to; sometimes, the bushes were watered twice a-day during the whole summer; on other occasions, a shallow trench was dug at a distance of about eighteen inches round the bush, into which warm water was poured morning and evening;[[1288]] while a third, and, perhaps, the surest, method was to plant them in pots, or baskets, which, during the winter months, were placed in sheltered sunny spots by day,[[1289]] and carried into the house at night; afterwards, when the season was sufficiently advanced, these portable gardens were buried in the earth.
Another favorite denizen of Hellenic gardens was the lily, which, probably, introduced from Suza or from Egypt, beheld the virginal snow of its bells compelled, by art, to put on various hues, as deep red and purple,[[1290]]—the former, by infusing, before planting, cinnabar into the bulb,—the latter, by steeping it in the lees of purple wine. This flower naturally begins to bloom[[1291]] just as the roses are fading; but, to produce a succession of lilies at different seasons, some were set near the surface, which grew up and blossomed immediately, while others were buried at different depths, according to the times at which they were required to flower.