We have already mentioned Polin's rose, a sweet Italian blossom which never strays from the foot of Monte Baldo, in the neighborhood of Verona. Its large crimson corollas open in handsome clusters.
Sicily and Greece possess the gluey rose, (rosa glutinosa,) a small, red, solitary flower, with glandular, viscous leaflets.
Germany is poorer in native roses than any other part of Europe; nevertheless nowhere do the blossoms of the field-rose display such beauty, unless, indeed, among the mountains of Switzerland. Nowhere else are they so large, so deeply tinted, and double. Germany also gives birth to the curious turbinated rose, (rosa turbinata,) whose double corolla rests on a top-shaped ovary.
The whole chain of the Alps abounds with roses. The field-rose, and the ruby-red Alpine rose, (rosa alpina,) an elegant shrub which has contributed many esteemed varieties to our gardens, bloom in admirable luxuriance in every forest glade and mountain dingle; while the red-leaved rose, (rosa rubrifolia,) with red stalks and dark red petals, stands out in the summer landscape, a charming contrast to the green foliage of the surrounding trees.
The leaves of another species growing among the pines and firs of these elevated regions, the rose with prickly leaflets, (rosa spinulifolia,) emit when rubbed the same odor of turpentine that we have already noticed in the rosa involutaof Scotland. It is singular to observe that the only two roses we know with this smell are both natives of pine-covered mountains.
The east has for ages been esteemed the home of flowers; almost as soon as we can lisp, we are taught that
"In eastern lands they talk with flowers,
And they tell in a garland their loves and cares;
Each blossom that blooms in their garden bowers
On its leaves a mystic language bears."
And in joyous youth who has not dreamed of that "bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream," so sweetly sung by the Irish bard? The very name of India reminds one of Nourmahal and of that most enchanting of all feasts, "the feast of roses."
It will then scarcely surprise any one to be told that Asia, the birthplace of the great human family, is also the birthplace of more varieties of roses than all the other parts of the world put together. Thirty-nine species have been discovered indigenous to this favored portion of the globe, fifteen of which belong to the Chinese empire.