"Why must the flowers die?
Prisoned they lie
In the cold tomb, heedless of tears and rain.
O doubting heart!
They only sleep below
The soft white ermine snow:
While winter winds shall blow,
To breathe and smile on you again!"
Rosa blanda's nearest neighbor is the pretty rosa rap of Hudson's Bay, whose slender, graceful branches are laden in the early summer with corymbs of pale pink double flowers. Nature herself has doubled rosa rapa's sweet corolla, as if she had foreseen that the wandering tribes of Esquimaux who inhabit those inclement shores would have too much to do in their never-ending struggle to pick up a precarious existence ever to busy themselves with the culture of the cold, unyielding soil.
Rosa blanda and rosa rapa are still at home in Labrador and Newfoundland, but with them two remarkable varieties—the ash-leaved rose, (rosa fraxinifolia,) with small red heart-shaped petals, and the lustrous rose, (rosa nitida,) which shelters its brilliant red cup-like flower and fruit beneath the scraggy trees that grow sparsely along the coast. The lustrous rose is a great favorite with the young Esquimaux maidens, who dress their black hair with its shining cups, and wear bunches of it, "embowered in its own green leaves," in the bosom of their seal-skin robes.
The United States possess a great number of different roses. At the foot of almost every rocky acclivity we meet the rose with diffuse branches, (rosa diffusa,) whose pink flowers, growing in couples on their stem, appear at the beginning of the summer. On the slopes of the Pennsylvanian hills blooms the small-flowered rose, (rosa parviflora,) an elegant little species bearing double flowers of the most delicate pink; it may fairly vie in beauty with all other American roses. In most of the Middle States, on the verge of the "mossy forests, by the bee-bird haunted," we find the straight-stemmed rose, (rosa stricta,) with light red petals, and the brier-leaved rose, (rosa rubifolia,) with small, pale red flowers, growing generally in clusters of three.
The silken rose (rosa setigera) opens its great red petals, shaped like an inverted heart, beneath the "cloistered boughs" of South Carolina's woods, and in Georgia the magnificent smooth-leaved rose, (rosa loevigata,) known in its native wilds as the Cherokee rose, climbs to the very summit of the great forest trees, then swings itself off in festoons of large white flowers glancing like stars amidst their glossy, dark green leaves.
When we leave the hills and woodlands, we find the marshes of the Carolinas gay with the rosa evratina, the rosa Carolina, and the rosa lucida, the resplendent rose, whose corymbs of brilliant red flowers overtop the reeds among which they love to blossom; while, nearer to the setting sun, we see the pink petals of Wood's rose (rosa Woodsii) reflected in the waters of the great Missouri.
The last American rose we shall note in this slight sketch is the rose of Montezuma, (rosa Montezumae,) a solitary, sweet-scented, pale red flower with defenceless branches. It was discovered by Humboldt and Bonpland on the elevated peaks of the Cerro Ventoso, in Mexico, and is perhaps the very rose of which the unhappy Guatimozin thought when writhing on his bed of burning charcoal.
These are some of the species yet known to belong peculiarly to the western hemisphere; but it is highly probable that many others remain still to be discovered. When we remember the prodigality with which nature lavishes her gifts, we cannot believe that while France alone possesses twenty-four varieties of roses, all described by De Candolle in his Flore Française, the great American continent owns but fifteen.
We will commence our European rose search in that most unpromising of all spots, Iceland; there, where volcanic fire and polar ice seem to dispute possession of the unhappy soil. So scarce is every kind of vegetation in this rude clime, that the miserable inhabitants are frequently compelled to feed their cows, sheep, and horses on dried fish. And yet even here, growing from the fissures of the barren rocks, a solitary cup-shaped rose opens its pale petals to the transient sunbeams of summer. This hardy little plant is, as its name, rosa spinosissima, indicates, covered all over with prickles. Its cream-colored flowers, numerous and solitary, are sometimes tinged with pink on the outside, and its fruit, at first red, becomes perfectly black when ripe.