In the latter part of the decline of the Roman Empire, when paganism still existed to a great degree, there arose a people who formed, as it were, the connecting link between the ancient and modern world—a people who acknowledged but one Supreme Ruler, and his sole vicegerent, Mahomet; a people whose origin was among the wildest tribes of Ishmael’s descendants, who possessed in a great degree the luxuries of civilized life, and among whom the arts, sciences, and agriculture, were very flourishing for many ages. Among the Moors of Spain, the culture of the Rose was pursued with as much scientific and practical method as at the present day, but with somewhat less happy results. When in Paris, some years since, we became acquainted with M. Hardy, the chief director of the Luxembourg gardens, and who is well known to rose growers, by the many beautiful varieties which he has originated. His interest in this subject was very great, and in 1828, he published in the Journal des Jardins some interesting observations which he had extracted from a manuscript of M. de la Neuville. The latter having been employed as military superintendent in Spain during the war of 1823, translated from a Spanish version some parts of an Arabian work upon culture in general, in which that of the Rose was mentioned, with some important particulars. It stated that the Moors, who formerly conquered Spain, attached the highest value to this most beautiful of their flowers, and cultivated it with as much care as we do ourselves. “According to Abu-el-Jaïr,” says the translation, “there are roses of many colors—carnation white, fallow or yellow, lapis-lazuli, or sky-blue. Some are of this last color on the outside, and yellow within. In the East they are acquainted with roses which are variegated with yellow and sky-blue, the inside of the corolla being of the one color, and the outside the other. The yellow-heart is very common in Tripoli and Syria, and the blue-heart is found on the coast of Alexandria.” To us, at the present day, this relation may with reason seem incredible, since amid the numerous varieties now existing, and the skill of their cultivators, we have in no instance been able to obtain a blue Rose. Abu-el-Jaïr may have ventured to state it as a fact without proper authority, for, according to M. de la Neuville, Abu-Abdallah-ebu-el-Fazel, another nearly contemporaneous author, enumerated a variety of roses without mentioning the blue. “There are,” says this last author, “four varieties of roses: the first is named the Double White; it has an exquisite odor, and its cup unites more than a hundred petals: the second is the Yellow, which is of a golden color, and bright as the jonquil; then the Purple; and lastly the flesh-colored, which is the most common of them all.” Farther on the same author adds: “The number of species is supposed to be large: the Mountain or Wild; the Double, which is variegated with red and white shades; and the Chinese. The Double, however, is the most beautiful, and is composed of forty to fifty petals.”
The Moors multiplied roses by all the various methods which are employed at this day: by suckers from the root, by cuttings, by budding, and by grafting. The pruning-knife was also freely used, in order to form regular heads.
There is a farther translation of De la Neuville from a Spanish version of the “Book of Agriculture,” written by Ebu-Alwan, who lived in the twelfth century, and who, in addition to his own experience, quoted largely from some Chaldaic and Arabic writers. He states that the Moors practiced two methods of sowing the seeds of the Rose. The first was in earthen pans—a mode adapted to delicate plants; they were watered immediately after being sown, and afterward twice a week until autumn, when such care became unnecessary. The other method was sowing broadcast as grain is sown, then covering the seed-beds an inch deep with carefully sifted manure or fine mould, and giving them the requisite watering. The plants from these seed-beds did not produce flowers until the third year after their being thus prepared, and until they had been transplanted into squares or borders; such is still the case with nearly all our summer roses, the only kind the Moors appear to have possessed. They also understood the art of forcing roses. “If you wish,” says Haj, another author, “the Rose tree to bloom in autumn, you must choose one that has been accustomed to periodical waterings; you must deprive it of water entirely during the heat of summer until August, and then give it an abundance of moisture; this will hasten its growth, and cause the expansion of its flowers in great profusion, without impairing its ability to bloom the ensuing spring, as usual.” “Or else,” adds the same author, “in the month of October, burn the old branches to the level of the earth, moisten the soil for eight consecutive days, and then suspend the watering; alternate these periods of moisture and drought as many as five times, and probably in about sixty days, or before the end of autumn, the roots will have thrown out vigorous branches, which will in due time be loaded with flowers, without destroying the ability of the plant to bloom again the following spring.” The climate in which the Moors lived—that of Cordova, Grenada, and Seville, where the winter is very much like our weather in mid-autumn—was very favorable to the cultivation of the Rose. In this country the same results could doubtless be obtained in the Carolinas, and the experiment would be well worth trying, even in the latitude of New York. It would be no small triumph to obtain an autumnal bloom of the many beautiful varieties of French, Moss, or Provence Roses. Haj has also given the method of keeping the Rose in bud, in order to prolong its period of blooming. His process, however, is of so uncertain a character, as scarcely to merit an insertion here. The manuscript of De la Neuville also contains particular directions for propagating roses, and for planting hedges of the Eglantine, to protect the vineyards and gardens, and at the same time to serve as stocks for grafting. Nothing is omitted in the Arabian treatise which pertains to the management of this shrub; the manner of cultivating, weeding, transplanting, watering, etc., are all particularly explained. Among a variety of curious matters, it contains the process by which, for the purpose of embellishing their gardens, they produced the appearance of trees whose tops are loaded with roses. A hollow pipe, four feet long, or more, if the top was to be large, was obtained, of a well-proportioned diameter, set upright, to resemble the trunk of a tree, and filled with earth or sand in a suitable state of moisture. In the top of this pipe were planted several varieties of roses, of different colors, which, rooting freely in the earth around them, soon formed a bushy head, and represented a third-class tree, clothed with rich foliage and beautiful flowers.
This plan could now be practiced with success; and we can scarcely imagine more beautiful objects in a lawn than a number of these pipes, of various heights, single, and in groups, some low, with the small heads of the China or Tea Roses, others high, and with the large, robust branches of the La Reine, and other Perpetuals, and others, again, planted with some delicate climbing roses, whose branches, falling down, would form a weeping tree of a most unique, graceful, and showy character. The pipes could be made of earthenware, tin, or wood, and be painted in imitation of the bark of a tree. Still better would be the trunk of a small tree, hollowed out for the purpose, which, with the bark on, would puzzle many a close observer, and which could show a luxuriant head of leaves and flowers on the most sterile soil that ever formed a lawn.
From what has been said on the culture of roses among the Moors in Spain, there can be no doubt that they had made great progress therein; and with the exception of a few statements, evidently unfounded in fact, as the grafting of the Rose on the almond, the apple, the jujube, and other trees, the little treatise translated by De la Neuville certainly contains most excellent remarks upon the culture of roses, whether we compare them with what the ancients have left us, or even with those of the various writers on Rose culture in Europe and America within the last half century.
As roses were so frequently propagated from the seed by the Moors, they must have known quite a number of varieties, exclusive of all those they had brought or obtained from the East. The Yellow Rose, unknown to us until recently, was apparently familiar to them; and the Blue Rose, of which their manuscripts speak, is now extinct, if it indeed ever existed; for amid the infinite variety of roses, of every color and shade, produced from seed in modern times, no one has yet obtained a purely Blue Rose, and its former existence may well seem to us incredible.
Besides the Moorish cultivation in Spain, the Rose has been an object of culture to a great extent in other countries. It has been cultivated principally for the beauty of its flowers, but in many parts of Europe and Asia, and in the north of Africa, its culture has been pursued for commercial purposes. Of its abundance in Palestine, some conception may be formed from the statement of travelers, that they have not only seen them wild and in great profusion in the vicinity of Jerusalem, but have found them in hedges, intermingled with pomegranate trees. Doubday states that, when the Eastern Christians made one of their processions in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, which continued some two hours, many persons were present with sacks full of rose petals, which they threw by handfuls on the people, and in such immense quantities, that many were covered with them, and they were scattered all over the pavement. In Syria and Persia it has been cultivated from a very early period, and the ancient name of the former, Suristan, is said to signify the land of roses. Damascus, Cashmere, Barbary, and Fayoum in Egypt, all cultivated the Rose extensively for its distilled oil or essence. Very little is extant respecting the culture of the Rose in the middle ages, but that it was cultivated and valued is known by its having been worn by knights at the tournament, as an emblem of their devotion to grace and beauty. According to Loudon, “Ludovico Verthema, who traveled in the East in 1503, observed that Tæssa was particularly celebrated for roses, and that he saw a great quantity of these flowers at Calicut.” The Rose is to this day also extensively cultivated in India, and for commercial purposes perhaps in greater abundance than is now known in any other country. Bishop Heber states that “Ghazepoor is celebrated throughout India for the wholesomeness of its air and the beauty and extent of its rose gardens. The rose-fields, which occupy many hundred acres in the neighborhood, are described as, at the proper season, extremely beautiful. They are cultivated for distillation and for making ‘Attar of Roses.’” He states also, that “many roses were growing in the garden of the palace of Delhi, and the fountain pipes were carved with images of roses.” Another writer describes in glowing colors the beauty of Ghazepoor, the Gul-istan (the rose beds,) of Bengal. “In the spring of the year, an extent of miles around the town presents to the eye a continual garden of roses, than which nothing can be more beautiful and fragrant. The sight is perfectly dazzling; the plain, as far as the eye can reach, extending in the same bespangled carpet of red and green. The breezes, too, are loaded with the sweet odor which is wafted far across the river Ganges.”
These statements sufficiently evince that the Rose was not only valued by the Hindoos as an article of commerce, but was intimately associated with their ideas of pleasure and enjoyment.
Persia, however, was, above all other countries, preëminent for roses. “Sir John Chardin, in 1686, found the gardens of the Persians without parterres, labyrinths, and other ornaments of European gardens, but filled with lilies, peach trees, and roses; and all modern travelers bear testimony to the esteem in which this flower is held in the East.” Sir Wm. Ousley tells us, in his travels in Persia, in 1819, that when he entered the flower garden belonging to the Governor of the Castle, near Farso, he was overwhelmed with roses; and Jackson, in his Journey, etc., 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 upon. Buckingham speaks of the rose plantations of Damascus as occupying an area of many acres, about three miles from that city. Sir Robert Ker Porter, speaking of the garden of one of the royal palaces of Persia, says: “I was struck with the appearance of two rose trees, full fourteen feet 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 roses, 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 favorite flowers. Here, indeed, the stranger is more powerfully reminded, that he is in the genuine country of the nightingale and the Rose.” Rivers mentions that Sir John Malcolm told him, that when in Persia he had once breakfasted on an immense heap, or rather mount, of roses, which the Persians had raised in honor of him. The rose of Cashmere has been long celebrated in the East, for its brilliancy and delicacy of odor—
“Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere,
With its Roses, the brightest that earth ever gave?”