The rose was made for symbolism, metaphor, allusion. Its beautiful flowers – in the wild, each bearing the symbolically charged number of five petals – bloom alongside vicious thorns. Sight, touch, smell and taste – when petals are distilled into rose water or rose oil – are all captivated (or challenged) by this extraordinary plant. If only sound is missing, then that is a gap rapidly filled, as that of the physical transformation from the simplicity of the wild briar into the sophistication of the garden rose; and the cultural metamorphoses that the rose simultaneously experienced as the centuries passed roses quickly came to represent the earthly pleasures of the flesh as well as the transcendent virtues of the spirit. – became the sign of the alchemical mysticism of love.
A Rose half blown” had become a standard medical description of female genitals; “and thence”, explained the herbalist Nicholas Culpeper, “came the word to deflower a virgin.
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