Happy Saturday. We have just gotten through the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, so this Saturday's Classic is meant to bring a little light and springtime into everyone's feeds during these darkest days of the year. It's a look at the history of roses. This episode originally came out on June Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We're doing an episode that is, uh, you know, selfish because something I wanted to talk about for a long time, which is roses. Uh, because I love roses, but I am admittedly a total amateur in the garden. Our house when we bought it, came with a lot of roses, some of which are entertainingly. They have revealed themselves to me to be poorly chosen for the spots there is whoops, but like they're lovely. We have the most beautiful red roses that bloom like crazy every spring and summer and right into fall, that are right next to the steps on either side of the railings. But they're climbing roses, and so in the summer. We literally have to cut them back almost every day because they just keep coming into the walkway. And it's like, these are so beautiful and they're so hearty and healthy, and I really love them, but whoever picked them maybe didn't realize what kind they were. Um, and then I add to our little collection periodically. I'm I'm a lady who does not know that much about my roses, but I love them dearly. I've bought a few of the the fun hybrids of late in the past few years. So but I also had to wait until now all of this is saying to do this episode one. June is a very prolific time for roses, so it's kind of thematically right. But um, I knew that if we did this episode two early in the spring, that I would be tempted to a lot more roses as a consequence, and I'm already kind of out of space for places to put them. So I had to wait until we were at the point when growers and nurseries won't ship to us anymore because we're out of the planting season. So you're getting this in late June so that I can manage my own online shopping problems. That seems legitimate the history of roses. I conversely have an episode that I've been wanting to do for a while that has just been painful to work on and I still have not finished it and it's been weeks. So we'll surprise everyone with which episodes those are slash, that is, when they come out. Yeah, sometimes Tracy and I had to be careful about how we manage our own subjects. Uh And just as a caveat, I kind of said a similar thing at the beginning of our history of Veterinary medicine. This is, you know, definitely an overview. A lot has happened in the literal millions of years since roses have existed on this planet. Uh. So we can't cover every bit of minutia, but we're giving you the broad strokes of like the key moments. And on that note, In a history of Roses prepared for the American Rose Society, historian Jerry Haynes wrote, quote, Roses are incredibly complex, and many rose Arians are opinionated. That makes for a which is brew of nonaligned thinking and some downright nasty disagreements. You may have heard the saying that I went to a fight and a rose meeting broke out. This is because there is a lot of room for conjecture, angry opinions, and wild guesses. This sort of made me laugh one because I had never heard that expression, but it's quite delightful and too. It made me think of Downton Abbey, where there's some rose drama on the show. I actually have a Doubton Abbey rose in my garden now, which is named for violet. But this one genus of plant is perhaps the most famed in human history. I would go so far as to say it is, but I'm always a little bit reticent about superlatives, but it's the most famous. It's revered for its beauty, it's used symbolically, of course, it's made into consumables. There is a war named after them. We'll touch on that briefly. And in President Ronald Reagan made the rose the national floral emblem of the United States. But roses predate civilization as we know it by a significant margin. Yeah, they've existed for literally millions of years, But the image of the rose that you probably think of doesn't look much like the ones blooming in Asia as far back as an estimated seventy million years ago, or in North America thirty five million years ago. Ancient wild roses were fairly simple as some wild roses still today are, but even more simple than that. Many had only five pedals that bloomed into sort of a disc like shape. And curiously, roses are Northern Hemisphere natives. It's not yet understood why they are native to more than one continent in the Northern Hemisphere but not to the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah, I think you can probably if you're a very good gardener, transplant sum but in terms of naturally growing, they just have never sprung up there. The oldest of roses are considered the species roses, So these are varieties of roses that developed in nature without human intervention. So those ancient ancient ones as well as as more recent ones but that are still uncultivated, and those became the basis of all cultivated roses. But for a long time they did just find on their own. And there are some species rose groups that continue to grow today and that you can even purchase, as well as some that are just growing in the wild. And in addition to their simple blooms, they had some of the hallmarks of roses, so thorns, sepals, and hips, just like your modern roses, but they looked a little different. Roses have appeared in art and Minoan crete dating back to se b C, and Egyptian floral reads stated Circle one seventy CE feature a species of roses actually still living today. This is the Rosa ricardi, also known as the Rosa sancta, and it's colloquially known as the Holy rose of Abyssinia. In the fifth century b C. Herodotus wrote of a garden in Macedonia that housed roses, but what exact kinds of roses were there remains a matter of guesswork. There are also Biblical references to roses, but similarly, it's unclear if those references are correctly translated, or if the flowers in the text were actually something else, and then in translation rose kind of got subbed in for a flowering plant. Humans began cultivating roses starting roughly five thousand years ago. The oldest species of rose that continues today is the Rosa gallica, which is also called a French rose, that dates back to twelve hundred b C and has been growing in Asia and parts of Europe since that time. Yeah A lot of roses invoke French names, just f y I, They're not all the same. The damn As grows, known by its Latin name Rosa demascene and named for Damascus, is a descendant of that French rose. It has been around since at least nine variations of the Damas grows developed through cross breeding, became common eventually, and as the Roman Empire came into power, roses really really benefited. In the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, roses became incredibly popular, not just for their beauty, but for a wide range of other uses. So important was the rose and Roman culture that massive public rose gardens were established, and of course, fragrant roses were used to create perfumes. Various parts of the plants were and still are commonly used as curatives, and rose petals were used in Roman times to create natural confetti, which is sort of a lovely image. Throughout the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire, rose based products, as well as the plants themselves, were bartered among various cultures as they traveled their usual trade routes. The first known catalog of roses in the Western world was compiled circuit three BC by a Greek scientist and philosopher name Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. Theophrastus is sometimes called the father of botany for his extensive writing on plants, and his rose related research provides some of the earliest detailed analyzes of their physical composition. And in the first century Pliny the Elder wrote about roses. He talked of them being manipulated into blooming in the off season, sometimes over and over in various locations, because those multi blooms we're going to talk about later, we're not naturally occurring. As roses have been cultivated by humans, they've also taken on various symbolic associations, including meanings based on their colors. Of course, during the War of the Roses, York was represented by white roses and Lancaster by red. The white York rose Rosa alba dates back to the second century, and these roses continue to exist today, flourishing in naturally colder climates. Yeah, they need a little winter to actually succeed. This is a thing about roses that I was completely misinformed on and understood only much more recently. Like in my head, roses were much more delicate and required pretty uh temperate climate. Year round, and then my first springtime in Boston and I would walk through our neighborhood and they would just be these beautiful roses flourishing everywhere. I did not know that was possible, and then I felt ignorant. If you haven't been around him, uh yeah, I mean a lot of roses are very very hearty. It's one of the reasons they've become so popular globally is that, again, if you're living in the northern Hemisphere, they often do very well with very very little effort on the part of amateur gardeners. Almost anyone can grow rose, and one rose in particular that's noted in Europe in the late fift hundreds is the rosa centifolia and santifolia means one hundred leaves, and these flowers are also known as cabbage roses because of their round, thickly petaled blooms. At that point, leaves is actually probably referring to pebbles. That nomenclature didn't really exist, but Plymy and Theophrastus both wrote about roses with a hundred leaves, but there was no clear evidence of such roses existing until the late sixteenth century. Like we had these two writings that referenced them, but we didn't really have anything that resembled the hundred leaf rose until we started seeing them pretty commonly in the sixteenth century. There is reference to a rose in the book herbal written by John Garrard, and that describes roses that seemed to align with these hundred leaved flowers that were described in older writings. It didn't get the nickname cabbage rose until the seventeen hundreds, though. And coming up, we're going to talk about the roses of seventeenth century Europe. But first we're gonna take a little break so we can hear from one of our sponsors. Almost a hundred and fifty years after the conclusion of the conflict between your in Lancaster, Charles, the first of England's royal botanist, wrote of English white roses in Sine that botanist John Parkinson described two kinds of white roses, one thicker and more abundant with flowers than the other, although he noted the differences could be caused by environmental factors, saying quote some do judge these to be but one kind. The diversity happening by the air or ground, or both Parkinson wrote as well, of a carnation rose, using the Latin rosa incarnata, and at this point the use of the word carnation was associated with basically the scan tone of white people, so it's likely that he was writing of a pale, pinkish bloom. Throughout the sixteen hundreds, roses went through a massive surge in popularity. They were so valued that roses and even rose water were sometimes used as currency in Europe, and by that time they were also very common as part of medical treatments. Paradisis terrestris, one of Parkinson's books, is the first English book to discuss roses as arden plants rather than as medicinal plants. Roses had of course been grown for their beauty before that time, both in England and elsewhere, but most writing about them had a lot more to do with their practical uses instead of their visual appeal. Initially, even roses grown in the garden setting weren't really the focal point of any landscape plan. They tended to be relegated to the edges, but eventually they came into uses hedges and its accents, and then slowly kind of moved to be the center of some gardens. The writings about roses being used medicinal ng are also clouded by poor nomenclature and classification. For example, the word rose or rosa became so commonly used that it started to apply to other plants or flowers that were not actually roses. Additionally, the plants were often described with less than ideal to tail, for modern readers to figure out just what specific plant the writer might have been talking about. I know I ran into that difficulty when I was looking for artwork to go with this episode, and I just, Uh, the farther that I went back in are the more I was like, I'm not sure that's actually a rose. Yeah, yeah, there are some that, like I said, they just got sub dright in. That's a very pretty cuss of petals colored rose. Uh. Incidentally, Parkinson was also the first writer to describe a native North American rose species being grown in Europe, so it had traveled across the Atlantic and back. In sixty he wrote Theatrum botanic Um, and he said in it quote, the Virginia briar rose hath diverse as great stems and branches as any other rose, whose young are green and the elder grayish set with many small prickles and a few great thorns among them. The leaves are very green and shining, small and almost round, many set on a middle rib, one against the other, somewhat like unto the single yellow rose. The flower stand at the tops of the branches, consisting of five small leaves or a pale, purple or deep incarnate color like, unto those the sweet briar, which fall away quickly, as though and others do. In the mid sixteen hundreds, herbalist Nicholas Culpepper wrote a book titled herbal And which he discussed the many health benefits roses had to offer. He wrote, quote, the white and red roses are cooling and drying, and yet the white is taken to exceed red in both the properties, but as seldom used inwardly in any medicine. The bitterness and the roses when they are fresh, especially the juice purges, color and watery humors. But being dried, and the heat which caused the bitterness being consumed, they have then a binding and a stringent quality. Culpepper was full of ideas about roses medicinal qualities. Uh He suggested that an extract made from red roses could be combined with wine to treat headaches, ear ache, sore eyes, sore throat, or irritated gums. I will confess that part of me is like, are you maybe just drunk and you don't feel sick anymore? Um, that's the case with so many patent medicines UH. For chest pain, he prescribed a similar her formula, still with the roses in it, uh, presumably to make something more like a poultice or a pace that you would apply on the area over your heart. That same compound could be applied to the abdomen for belly aches. And he also said that a powder made from the yellow strings from the middle of the rose quote drank in the distilled water of quinces, stays the overflowing of women's courses. He really thought, basically that red roses were full of uses, and he even stated quote to write at large of every one of these would make my book swell too big, it being sufficient for a volume of itself to speak fully of them. But just the same, he really did talk a lot about roses, and specifically red roses, and what you could do with them to improve your health in his book and the Late seventeenth century, grafting was being used as a way to manipulate roses. Was common for gardeners to graft roses onto briars to sculpt blooming plants. Multiple different roses were sometimes grafted onto one root stock to create unique and visually spectacular garden teachers, Yeah, there are some writings where you'll see them counting the many numbers of different kinds of roses that are blossoming on a single uh brier. Similarly, there was not much in the way of documentation of the work that had been done along the Mediterranean and then throughout Europe to cross breed and cultivate roses. It really wasn't until the nineteenth century that records of the work that was being done in greenhouses and gardens in relation to the genus Rosa started to be kind of consistent. The earliest organized breeding program that's fully documented began in Perth, Scotland in sevente Wild Scotch roses were brought into the Dixon and Brown Nursery and one of those plants produced flowers with a hint of red in them. From that plant, a new one was bred with double flowers, and they selectively bred from that and so on until the nursery had cultivated eight different double roses. And selective breeding had most certainly been done before this, including in China and the Middle East, and we're gonna talk a lot more about China and the min it, but this marks the first time that we know of that careful records of that process were kept and survive for us to read today. And roses from China really changed everything once they were introduced to Europe. But this aspect of rose history, like so many others, is not always clear. For one thing, as roses moved along trading routes, they would sometimes be attributed not to their place of origin, which was China, but to another stop on the trade route, which was India. And as corrections were attempted in this record, sometimes that just meant the same plant was described as coming from China, India, and Bengal, depending on whose account you read. Yeah. And then like there would be roses that were traded maybe in India, and they had started in China, but then they led to different uh cultivations native to India. And because a lot of people were creating similar things or seeing similar plants, but at different points on the curve. There are some roses that have multiple different names. Rose naming is a very tricky arena with a lot of duplicates, and you'll see sometimes the same exact plant given to different names, and that's part of why. But in any case, while there were some Chinese roast species in Europe by the mid eighteenth century, it wasn't until the late seventeen hundreds that trade relations were established between Britain and China, and China's horticultural expertise completely changed the Western world's knowledge of the possibilities of roses. Chinese gardeners had been working with roses for thousands of years at that point, but as we said, little record of that work that was done to breed them was preserved. While there were a number of cultivated and wild roses from China introduced into Europe, four eventually arrived that caused a huge shift in the genetic possibilities that were open to cultivators. These are referred to as the four stud China's This reminds me of like the foundation sires from horse breeding that we talked about in the Kentucky Derby episode. It's exactly the same idea, except what's interesting is that since, like we talk or if you read any books about roses in their their historical cultivation, they talk about the four stud China's, like, you know, with great reverence and import but we don't know exactly how those were even developed. So there's it's kind of funny to me that this whole foundation is built on a thing we can't quite identify the lineage of the first though of the four stead China's, as a pink rose called old Blessed China. It also had an older nickname, which was Parsons Pink China, and it was described by one English writer as quote the most elegant rose and also quote justly considered as one of the greatest ornaments ever introduced to this country. The second of the four stud China's to arrive in Europe was called Slater's Crimson and was, as you might surmise read, had large flowers and bloomed year round. It didn't require much care, and it was described in Curtis's Botanical Magazine has a plant which quote maybe reared almost in a coffee cup, is kept with the least possible trouble, and propagated without difficulty. Both it and the parsons pink China were being grown in European gardens by the end of the seventeen hundreds. In the early eighteen hundreds, humes blushed tea scented China joined the stud China's and it was alleged as that name indicates, to have a fragrance of tea, although there is a bit of debate that goes on and on as to whether or not that characterization of scent is accurate. That rose initially traveled to Europe via the East India Company, and there are sums that have speculated that it may have taken on the scent of the teas that were imported at the same time, and that that's what people were smelling and not a pleasant odor produced by the bloom. The fourth of the stud China's was the Parks of Yellow, which people were extremely excited about because it was yellow. Yeah, there had been a lot of effort to cultivate healthy yellow roses for quite some time, but it was really tricky to get like a really true saturated color with it. So this like opened up the genetic possibilities in a huge way and people were very excited about it. Uh And next up we're going to talk about how Empress Josephine Bonaparte helped the cause of roses in Europe. But before we do list pause, we'll have a little sponsor break. Once the four stud China roses were incorporated into breeding programs in Europe and North America, rose varieties almost literally exploded in number. Like you just could not keep up with all of the cross breeding that people were doing. As these exciting new plants were making their collective debut in the Western world, Napoleon Bonaparte's wife became one of the roses greatest champions. West of Paris. At her chateau New mademoisean Empress Josephine Bonaparte had a massive rose garden planted. She was so enamored of roses and so dedicated to them that she wanted a sample of freek known rose in the world in her collection. She hired expert gardeners to tend and develop them, and she amassed more than two hundred fifty species in her garden. Knowing that the winters would be hard on some of her beloved plants, she had greenhouses built with their own coal burning heat sources, which is amazing and horticulturally really cool because at that point plenty of humans are not living as well as her plants. Yeah, it's cool from a horticultural standpoint, but from a human one exactly. I have this like mental image, and I have no like historical documentation to back this up, but I just had this mental image of like impoverished people staring at these greenhouses, like where the plants are being heated in winter, and thinking, are you kidding me? That would be really nice for us to not be cold. Botanical illustrator Peter Joseph dot who was an artist who served in the court of Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette, and also managed to continue to be successful throughout the French Revolution. He did not become victimized by his associations. Published a collection of watercolor simply titled Rose in three volumes over the course of eighteen seventeen to eighteen twenty four, and the illustrations that he included in that collection are generally seen as his finest work. Many continue to be reprinted today, both in books and as just prints that you can purchase, and his research for that art was conducted in the garden planted by Empress Josephine, Napoleon's wife had been re Dute's patron for years, but unfortunately she did not live to see his work in her garden come to fruition. He started publishing a few years after her death. In eighteen sixty seven, the first hybrid tea rose was introduced by a French nurseryman named John Baptiste Gillo, and it was called La France, which tickles me. What was part of a contest? It still tickles me. T Roses refers to plants that had been bread using humes blush and parks double yellow, and the tea scent vanished in the breeding, but this name has remained. I didn't know that that was where the name came from. Yeah, I think a lot of people and I certainly did this for a long time. You kind of make up associations in your head, like, oh, that would be lovely on a tea table. That must be why these are called. I thought they are small and delicate, like teacups. That's why. See it's the same thing. Uh. Incidentally, I poked around one. Like I said at the top of this show, I have a bad habit of getting excited about things we talked about wanting to purchase them, so I looked around for La France and I did find a nursery that claims to have them, but they're not in season right now to sell. But you better believe next year, I'm going to look for him uh and find a place in the yard. I will make a place, will make it happen. The La France rose, which as I just said, is still produced today, was a massive step forward in rose breeding. So up to that point there had been many efforts to create a repeat flowering rose instead of one that just bloomed once to ring its blooming season and then not again. But La France was the first success in this. Not only are it soft pink flowers which look very creamy and beautiful, lush and full, but it produces them over and over in its blooming season instead of just one time and then done. And it was initially difficult to breed La France because it had a chromosomal abnormality, so when other people try to use it to create their own they had some problems, but it inspired a great deal of additional breeding work and research to create similarly prolific bloomers. The moment of la frances unveiling is commonly used as the dividing line between what are known as old garden roses and modern roses. The American Rose Society uses these two groups plus species roses to sort out all of the many, many varieties of rose. And that's tricky, anybody will tell you. Even the lines of those groups are not always consistent. Uh, there are some fuzzy spots in the middle, or some that overlap each other a little bit. And as we mentioned when discussing roses ancient origins, species roses or those that existed naturally, old garden roses are in very basic terms, hybrids developed through cross pollinating species roses. The old garden group includes white Alba roses, which can include shades of creamy whites that also have some hints of soft pink, Demas roses and China roses. And then modern roses include hybrid tea roses, Flora bundas, and Grande Flora's, and we're going to talk about those types in just a moment. Gio made another significant contribution to rose history in eighteen seventy five when he introduced a Polyantha rose, which was a small compact plant that produced very tightly packed blooms. The Guillo family, by the way, continues to go roses from their families history as well as breed new roses in their nursery in France. Yeah they're in Urche's near the Belgian border. And all of this work done to create new plants with lush, multi layered blooms also resulted in plants that needed less shaping through pruning. Old garden roses were generally very hardy. They could survive in a lot of different soil conditions, and they could resist many pests and fungus, but newer roses continued to improve on those qualities, and as we just mentioned, modern roses also produced more flowers, whereas most old garden roses only bloomed in one season per year. The modern era of hybridization also led to advancements in color variation, so whereas shades in the spectrum of white to red where the most common and the rose population, hybridization leads to more and more colors. Yellow roses had been sought after in Europe for centuries, and there was some success in developing through grafting and improving a species from Turkey to produce double flowers. Today For example, you can find roses and shades of orange and apricot, dark purple's, multicolor varieties, and some that even approached black, although no true black rose has been created yet. No, they're definitely Nursery is hard at work on it. I guarantee you right this minute, because it's one of those things that people want. We all want a little gothic garden. I do. I have some very dark purples that I love, love, love, but they don't quite get black. Old garden roses really did have one particular area where they outpaced their hybridized modern cousins for quite some time, though, and that was with their aromatic sense. While the modern breeding of roses has produced flowers that smell like the seven scents that are normally associated with roses that include citrus, clove tea, violet apple, and nastritium, the classic rose scent of old garden roses, in particular was stronger than what you would smell necessarily in most rose scented flowers today, like that smell that you associate with roses, Although there is ongoing work to produce more and more fragrant roses. For a while in breeding beautiful things a roma was less important, but a lot of home gardeners have made it known that they would really like to have beautiful smelling flowers as well as beautiful looking flowers, so there is more breeding work going on to produce more fragrant blooms. Today, it is unknown how many different species of rose exists. Wild roses are difficult to track, and we don't know how many have survived through time, how many naturally hybridized and created new species, etcetera. Additionally, some species change genetically over time without hybridization, and some varieties raise a great deal of debate because they are so close to others, and people argue about whether they should be considered separate species. And walking back to the passage we read at the beginning of the episode, things can get incredibly contentious in the rose expert community. Yeah. Also, I mean, I don't even I'm sure there are people that do such things, but I don't even know how you would begin to try to catalog all of the existing roses on Earth. Hybrid tea roses make up the majority of roses that are grown in gardens today. The other groups of rose are the Flora bunda roses, which are crosses of hybrid tea roses and polyantha and grand of Flora roses, which are crossbreeds of hybrid tea roses and Flora Bundus. Roses of course also come in climbing varieties and shrubs and miniatures, but hybrid tea roses are the hardy ones that most gardens are going to have a lot of. If you have a home garden, you probably have that. If you have roses, We're gonna talk a bit about roses and food and medicine today. Rose Hips have been used as an edible for hundreds of years across many cultures. The hips are those bulbous, fruit like bumps that form at the end of a bloom after the petals have fallen off, and that's where the seeds develop. They start off green and they usually turn red as they make sure. Rose Hips are used to make tea, jelly and other foods, and then rose syrups are usually made from the oil distilled from the rose petals. Yeah, I'm gonna make rose jelly this year. I decided, Oh, that sounds because I have a lot of rose bushes at this point, and I might as well. But I had to do more research because like the the seeds, you want to hold out. One of the things that will come up if you look up whether or not roses or poisonous, they're generally not. Some people will mention that there is a minute amount of cyanide in the seeds, similar to the way there is a minute amount of cyanide in an apple seed. It's very scary when you see the word cyanide, but really there they're one. You are not eating the seeds. Theoretically too, if you did, it's a very tiny, tiny amount, but even so, be careful and take care of you. But I'm totally making rose jelly. But the other thing it's interesting about rose hips is that they are naturally very high in vitamin C, and so they are often used in cold and flute remedies. But there is a trick here because the process of drying the hips to produce medicine destroys a lot of their vitamin C content. So if you're purchasing like a rose hip based vitamin C item, a lot of the time they're supplemented with other sources because even after they're dried and made into a thing, the vitamin C that comes from the rose hips degrades pretty rapidly. It's also unclear how beneficial vitamin C really is, right, Uh. I know when I was in massage school slash working as a massage therapist, there were lots of complimentary and alternative medicine uses for roses and for rose oil and for rose water, and a lot of them had to do with like your minstrel cycle or childbirth. Uh. Yeah, I find rose things also just very very delicious, Like a good rose syrup in a cocktail is heaven to me? Heaven? I love it. Yeah. I love the fragrance of roses a lot. Uh, and it I find it to be very calming. It is. I like all of the cookie smelling roses, Like we have one that smells very heavily of clove and one that smells very heavily of citrus, And I just love them because they're so sort of I had not known prior to owning this house and those plants, one of which came with the house, that I was like, rose, this rose smells like oranges? What is that? I had never been exposed to a roses smell like oranges before seven years ago. Somehow make a chip to Atlanta when your roses are blooming, then uh yeah, that one we're right in the middle, like it hit through a bunch of blooms and then you know, I deadhead them because you pull the the bloomed bits off because if you have read, I need to do the science to back this up, but this is what I've read that if you let them develop their hips, they will stop blooming as much. So we pull the heads off and they're not. The plant is is getting the message that it should continue to bloom because it, you know, plants want to produce fruit. That's what it's doing, wants to to seed and propagate. But if all of this talk has inspired you to create your own rose, that is actually a thing that you can do. Amateur gardeners can cross breed this. San Francisco Gate actually has a really nice guide for amateur hybrid breeders that walks you through the whole process, and we're going to include that in the show notes. So if you think you would like to develop your own rooms, you can. Although there are lots and lots of expert gardeners and nurseries around the world constantly coming up with new and really beautiful and amazing roses, so probably you will not be competing with them, but you can make your own unique hybrid at home if you are patient. Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Happy Saturday. We have just gotten through the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, so this Saturday's Classic is meant to bring a little light and springtime into everyone's feeds during these darkest days of the year. It's a look at the history of roses. This episode originally came out on June Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. We're doing an episode that is, uh, you know, selfish because something I wanted to talk about for a long time, which is roses. Uh, because I love roses, but I am admittedly a total amateur in the garden. Our house when we bought it, came with a lot of roses, some of which are entertainingly. They have revealed themselves to me to be poorly chosen for the spots there is whoops, but like they're lovely. We have the most beautiful red roses that bloom like crazy every spring and summer and right into fall, that are right next to the steps on either side of the railings. But they're climbing roses, and so in the summer. We literally have to cut them back almost every day because they just keep coming into the walkway. And it's like, these are so beautiful and they're so hearty and healthy, and I really love them, but whoever picked them maybe didn't realize what kind they were. Um, and then I add to our little collection periodically. I'm I'm a lady who does not know that much about my roses, but I love them dearly. I've bought a few of the the fun hybrids of late in the past few years. So but I also had to wait until now all of this is saying to do this episode one. June is a very prolific time for roses, so it's kind of thematically right. But um, I knew that if we did this episode two early in the spring, that I would be tempted to a lot more roses as a consequence, and I'm already kind of out of space for places to put them. So I had to wait until we were at the point when growers and nurseries won't ship to us anymore because we're out of the planting season. So you're getting this in late June so that I can manage my own online shopping problems. That seems legitimate the history of roses. I conversely have an episode that I've been wanting to do for a while that has just been painful to work on and I still have not finished it and it's been weeks. So we'll surprise everyone with which episodes those are slash, that is, when they come out. Yeah, sometimes Tracy and I had to be careful about how we manage our own subjects. Uh And just as a caveat, I kind of said a similar thing at the beginning of our history of Veterinary medicine. This is, you know, definitely an overview. A lot has happened in the literal millions of years since roses have existed on this planet. Uh. So we can't cover every bit of minutia, but we're giving you the broad strokes of like the key moments. And on that note, In a history of Roses prepared for the American Rose Society, historian Jerry Haynes wrote, quote, Roses are incredibly complex, and many rose Arians are opinionated. That makes for a which is brew of nonaligned thinking and some downright nasty disagreements. You may have heard the saying that I went to a fight and a rose meeting broke out. This is because there is a lot of room for conjecture, angry opinions, and wild guesses. This sort of made me laugh one because I had never heard that expression, but it's quite delightful and too. It made me think of Downton Abbey, where there's some rose drama on the show. I actually have a Doubton Abbey rose in my garden now, which is named for violet. But this one genus of plant is perhaps the most famed in human history. I would go so far as to say it is, but I'm always a little bit reticent about superlatives, but it's the most famous. It's revered for its beauty, it's used symbolically, of course, it's made into consumables. There is a war named after them. We'll touch on that briefly. And in President Ronald Reagan made the rose the national floral emblem of the United States. But roses predate civilization as we know it by a significant margin. Yeah, they've existed for literally millions of years, But the image of the rose that you probably think of doesn't look much like the ones blooming in Asia as far back as an estimated seventy million years ago, or in North America thirty five million years ago. Ancient wild roses were fairly simple as some wild roses still today are, but even more simple than that. Many had only five pedals that bloomed into sort of a disc like shape. And curiously, roses are Northern Hemisphere natives. It's not yet understood why they are native to more than one continent in the Northern Hemisphere but not to the Southern Hemisphere. Yeah, I think you can probably if you're a very good gardener, transplant sum but in terms of naturally growing, they just have never sprung up there. The oldest of roses are considered the species roses, So these are varieties of roses that developed in nature without human intervention. So those ancient ancient ones as well as as more recent ones but that are still uncultivated, and those became the basis of all cultivated roses. But for a long time they did just find on their own. And there are some species rose groups that continue to grow today and that you can even purchase, as well as some that are just growing in the wild. And in addition to their simple blooms, they had some of the hallmarks of roses, so thorns, sepals, and hips, just like your modern roses, but they looked a little different. Roses have appeared in art and Minoan crete dating back to se b C, and Egyptian floral reads stated Circle one seventy CE feature a species of roses actually still living today. This is the Rosa ricardi, also known as the Rosa sancta, and it's colloquially known as the Holy rose of Abyssinia. In the fifth century b C. Herodotus wrote of a garden in Macedonia that housed roses, but what exact kinds of roses were there remains a matter of guesswork. There are also Biblical references to roses, but similarly, it's unclear if those references are correctly translated, or if the flowers in the text were actually something else, and then in translation rose kind of got subbed in for a flowering plant. Humans began cultivating roses starting roughly five thousand years ago. The oldest species of rose that continues today is the Rosa gallica, which is also called a French rose, that dates back to twelve hundred b C and has been growing in Asia and parts of Europe since that time. Yeah A lot of roses invoke French names, just f y I, They're not all the same. The damn As grows, known by its Latin name Rosa demascene and named for Damascus, is a descendant of that French rose. It has been around since at least nine variations of the Damas grows developed through cross breeding, became common eventually, and as the Roman Empire came into power, roses really really benefited. In the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, roses became incredibly popular, not just for their beauty, but for a wide range of other uses. So important was the rose and Roman culture that massive public rose gardens were established, and of course, fragrant roses were used to create perfumes. Various parts of the plants were and still are commonly used as curatives, and rose petals were used in Roman times to create natural confetti, which is sort of a lovely image. Throughout the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire, rose based products, as well as the plants themselves, were bartered among various cultures as they traveled their usual trade routes. The first known catalog of roses in the Western world was compiled circuit three BC by a Greek scientist and philosopher name Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. Theophrastus is sometimes called the father of botany for his extensive writing on plants, and his rose related research provides some of the earliest detailed analyzes of their physical composition. And in the first century Pliny the Elder wrote about roses. He talked of them being manipulated into blooming in the off season, sometimes over and over in various locations, because those multi blooms we're going to talk about later, we're not naturally occurring. As roses have been cultivated by humans, they've also taken on various symbolic associations, including meanings based on their colors. Of course, during the War of the Roses, York was represented by white roses and Lancaster by red. The white York rose Rosa alba dates back to the second century, and these roses continue to exist today, flourishing in naturally colder climates. Yeah, they need a little winter to actually succeed. This is a thing about roses that I was completely misinformed on and understood only much more recently. Like in my head, roses were much more delicate and required pretty uh temperate climate. Year round, and then my first springtime in Boston and I would walk through our neighborhood and they would just be these beautiful roses flourishing everywhere. I did not know that was possible, and then I felt ignorant. If you haven't been around him, uh yeah, I mean a lot of roses are very very hearty. It's one of the reasons they've become so popular globally is that, again, if you're living in the northern Hemisphere, they often do very well with very very little effort on the part of amateur gardeners. Almost anyone can grow rose, and one rose in particular that's noted in Europe in the late fift hundreds is the rosa centifolia and santifolia means one hundred leaves, and these flowers are also known as cabbage roses because of their round, thickly petaled blooms. At that point, leaves is actually probably referring to pebbles. That nomenclature didn't really exist, but Plymy and Theophrastus both wrote about roses with a hundred leaves, but there was no clear evidence of such roses existing until the late sixteenth century. Like we had these two writings that referenced them, but we didn't really have anything that resembled the hundred leaf rose until we started seeing them pretty commonly in the sixteenth century. There is reference to a rose in the book herbal written by John Garrard, and that describes roses that seemed to align with these hundred leaved flowers that were described in older writings. It didn't get the nickname cabbage rose until the seventeen hundreds, though. And coming up, we're going to talk about the roses of seventeenth century Europe. But first we're gonna take a little break so we can hear from one of our sponsors. Almost a hundred and fifty years after the conclusion of the conflict between your in Lancaster, Charles, the first of England's royal botanist, wrote of English white roses in Sine that botanist John Parkinson described two kinds of white roses, one thicker and more abundant with flowers than the other, although he noted the differences could be caused by environmental factors, saying quote some do judge these to be but one kind. The diversity happening by the air or ground, or both Parkinson wrote as well, of a carnation rose, using the Latin rosa incarnata, and at this point the use of the word carnation was associated with basically the scan tone of white people, so it's likely that he was writing of a pale, pinkish bloom. Throughout the sixteen hundreds, roses went through a massive surge in popularity. They were so valued that roses and even rose water were sometimes used as currency in Europe, and by that time they were also very common as part of medical treatments. Paradisis terrestris, one of Parkinson's books, is the first English book to discuss roses as arden plants rather than as medicinal plants. Roses had of course been grown for their beauty before that time, both in England and elsewhere, but most writing about them had a lot more to do with their practical uses instead of their visual appeal. Initially, even roses grown in the garden setting weren't really the focal point of any landscape plan. They tended to be relegated to the edges, but eventually they came into uses hedges and its accents, and then slowly kind of moved to be the center of some gardens. The writings about roses being used medicinal ng are also clouded by poor nomenclature and classification. For example, the word rose or rosa became so commonly used that it started to apply to other plants or flowers that were not actually roses. Additionally, the plants were often described with less than ideal to tail, for modern readers to figure out just what specific plant the writer might have been talking about. I know I ran into that difficulty when I was looking for artwork to go with this episode, and I just, Uh, the farther that I went back in are the more I was like, I'm not sure that's actually a rose. Yeah, yeah, there are some that, like I said, they just got sub dright in. That's a very pretty cuss of petals colored rose. Uh. Incidentally, Parkinson was also the first writer to describe a native North American rose species being grown in Europe, so it had traveled across the Atlantic and back. In sixty he wrote Theatrum botanic Um, and he said in it quote, the Virginia briar rose hath diverse as great stems and branches as any other rose, whose young are green and the elder grayish set with many small prickles and a few great thorns among them. The leaves are very green and shining, small and almost round, many set on a middle rib, one against the other, somewhat like unto the single yellow rose. The flower stand at the tops of the branches, consisting of five small leaves or a pale, purple or deep incarnate color like, unto those the sweet briar, which fall away quickly, as though and others do. In the mid sixteen hundreds, herbalist Nicholas Culpepper wrote a book titled herbal And which he discussed the many health benefits roses had to offer. He wrote, quote, the white and red roses are cooling and drying, and yet the white is taken to exceed red in both the properties, but as seldom used inwardly in any medicine. The bitterness and the roses when they are fresh, especially the juice purges, color and watery humors. But being dried, and the heat which caused the bitterness being consumed, they have then a binding and a stringent quality. Culpepper was full of ideas about roses medicinal qualities. Uh He suggested that an extract made from red roses could be combined with wine to treat headaches, ear ache, sore eyes, sore throat, or irritated gums. I will confess that part of me is like, are you maybe just drunk and you don't feel sick anymore? Um, that's the case with so many patent medicines UH. For chest pain, he prescribed a similar her formula, still with the roses in it, uh, presumably to make something more like a poultice or a pace that you would apply on the area over your heart. That same compound could be applied to the abdomen for belly aches. And he also said that a powder made from the yellow strings from the middle of the rose quote drank in the distilled water of quinces, stays the overflowing of women's courses. He really thought, basically that red roses were full of uses, and he even stated quote to write at large of every one of these would make my book swell too big, it being sufficient for a volume of itself to speak fully of them. But just the same, he really did talk a lot about roses, and specifically red roses, and what you could do with them to improve your health in his book and the Late seventeenth century, grafting was being used as a way to manipulate roses. Was common for gardeners to graft roses onto briars to sculpt blooming plants. Multiple different roses were sometimes grafted onto one root stock to create unique and visually spectacular garden teachers, Yeah, there are some writings where you'll see them counting the many numbers of different kinds of roses that are blossoming on a single uh brier. Similarly, there was not much in the way of documentation of the work that had been done along the Mediterranean and then throughout Europe to cross breed and cultivate roses. It really wasn't until the nineteenth century that records of the work that was being done in greenhouses and gardens in relation to the genus Rosa started to be kind of consistent. The earliest organized breeding program that's fully documented began in Perth, Scotland in sevente Wild Scotch roses were brought into the Dixon and Brown Nursery and one of those plants produced flowers with a hint of red in them. From that plant, a new one was bred with double flowers, and they selectively bred from that and so on until the nursery had cultivated eight different double roses. And selective breeding had most certainly been done before this, including in China and the Middle East, and we're gonna talk a lot more about China and the min it, but this marks the first time that we know of that careful records of that process were kept and survive for us to read today. And roses from China really changed everything once they were introduced to Europe. But this aspect of rose history, like so many others, is not always clear. For one thing, as roses moved along trading routes, they would sometimes be attributed not to their place of origin, which was China, but to another stop on the trade route, which was India. And as corrections were attempted in this record, sometimes that just meant the same plant was described as coming from China, India, and Bengal, depending on whose account you read. Yeah. And then like there would be roses that were traded maybe in India, and they had started in China, but then they led to different uh cultivations native to India. And because a lot of people were creating similar things or seeing similar plants, but at different points on the curve. There are some roses that have multiple different names. Rose naming is a very tricky arena with a lot of duplicates, and you'll see sometimes the same exact plant given to different names, and that's part of why. But in any case, while there were some Chinese roast species in Europe by the mid eighteenth century, it wasn't until the late seventeen hundreds that trade relations were established between Britain and China, and China's horticultural expertise completely changed the Western world's knowledge of the possibilities of roses. Chinese gardeners had been working with roses for thousands of years at that point, but as we said, little record of that work that was done to breed them was preserved. While there were a number of cultivated and wild roses from China introduced into Europe, four eventually arrived that caused a huge shift in the genetic possibilities that were open to cultivators. These are referred to as the four stud China's This reminds me of like the foundation sires from horse breeding that we talked about in the Kentucky Derby episode. It's exactly the same idea, except what's interesting is that since, like we talk or if you read any books about roses in their their historical cultivation, they talk about the four stud China's, like, you know, with great reverence and import but we don't know exactly how those were even developed. So there's it's kind of funny to me that this whole foundation is built on a thing we can't quite identify the lineage of the first though of the four stead China's, as a pink rose called old Blessed China. It also had an older nickname, which was Parsons Pink China, and it was described by one English writer as quote the most elegant rose and also quote justly considered as one of the greatest ornaments ever introduced to this country. The second of the four stud China's to arrive in Europe was called Slater's Crimson and was, as you might surmise read, had large flowers and bloomed year round. It didn't require much care, and it was described in Curtis's Botanical Magazine has a plant which quote maybe reared almost in a coffee cup, is kept with the least possible trouble, and propagated without difficulty. Both it and the parsons pink China were being grown in European gardens by the end of the seventeen hundreds. In the early eighteen hundreds, humes blushed tea scented China joined the stud China's and it was alleged as that name indicates, to have a fragrance of tea, although there is a bit of debate that goes on and on as to whether or not that characterization of scent is accurate. That rose initially traveled to Europe via the East India Company, and there are sums that have speculated that it may have taken on the scent of the teas that were imported at the same time, and that that's what people were smelling and not a pleasant odor produced by the bloom. The fourth of the stud China's was the Parks of Yellow, which people were extremely excited about because it was yellow. Yeah, there had been a lot of effort to cultivate healthy yellow roses for quite some time, but it was really tricky to get like a really true saturated color with it. So this like opened up the genetic possibilities in a huge way and people were very excited about it. Uh And next up we're going to talk about how Empress Josephine Bonaparte helped the cause of roses in Europe. But before we do list pause, we'll have a little sponsor break. Once the four stud China roses were incorporated into breeding programs in Europe and North America, rose varieties almost literally exploded in number. Like you just could not keep up with all of the cross breeding that people were doing. As these exciting new plants were making their collective debut in the Western world, Napoleon Bonaparte's wife became one of the roses greatest champions. West of Paris. At her chateau New mademoisean Empress Josephine Bonaparte had a massive rose garden planted. She was so enamored of roses and so dedicated to them that she wanted a sample of freek known rose in the world in her collection. She hired expert gardeners to tend and develop them, and she amassed more than two hundred fifty species in her garden. Knowing that the winters would be hard on some of her beloved plants, she had greenhouses built with their own coal burning heat sources, which is amazing and horticulturally really cool because at that point plenty of humans are not living as well as her plants. Yeah, it's cool from a horticultural standpoint, but from a human one exactly. I have this like mental image, and I have no like historical documentation to back this up, but I just had this mental image of like impoverished people staring at these greenhouses, like where the plants are being heated in winter, and thinking, are you kidding me? That would be really nice for us to not be cold. Botanical illustrator Peter Joseph dot who was an artist who served in the court of Louis the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette, and also managed to continue to be successful throughout the French Revolution. He did not become victimized by his associations. Published a collection of watercolor simply titled Rose in three volumes over the course of eighteen seventeen to eighteen twenty four, and the illustrations that he included in that collection are generally seen as his finest work. Many continue to be reprinted today, both in books and as just prints that you can purchase, and his research for that art was conducted in the garden planted by Empress Josephine, Napoleon's wife had been re Dute's patron for years, but unfortunately she did not live to see his work in her garden come to fruition. He started publishing a few years after her death. In eighteen sixty seven, the first hybrid tea rose was introduced by a French nurseryman named John Baptiste Gillo, and it was called La France, which tickles me. What was part of a contest? It still tickles me. T Roses refers to plants that had been bread using humes blush and parks double yellow, and the tea scent vanished in the breeding, but this name has remained. I didn't know that that was where the name came from. Yeah, I think a lot of people and I certainly did this for a long time. You kind of make up associations in your head, like, oh, that would be lovely on a tea table. That must be why these are called. I thought they are small and delicate, like teacups. That's why. See it's the same thing. Uh. Incidentally, I poked around one. Like I said at the top of this show, I have a bad habit of getting excited about things we talked about wanting to purchase them, so I looked around for La France and I did find a nursery that claims to have them, but they're not in season right now to sell. But you better believe next year, I'm going to look for him uh and find a place in the yard. I will make a place, will make it happen. The La France rose, which as I just said, is still produced today, was a massive step forward in rose breeding. So up to that point there had been many efforts to create a repeat flowering rose instead of one that just bloomed once to ring its blooming season and then not again. But La France was the first success in this. Not only are it soft pink flowers which look very creamy and beautiful, lush and full, but it produces them over and over in its blooming season instead of just one time and then done. And it was initially difficult to breed La France because it had a chromosomal abnormality, so when other people try to use it to create their own they had some problems, but it inspired a great deal of additional breeding work and research to create similarly prolific bloomers. The moment of la frances unveiling is commonly used as the dividing line between what are known as old garden roses and modern roses. The American Rose Society uses these two groups plus species roses to sort out all of the many, many varieties of rose. And that's tricky, anybody will tell you. Even the lines of those groups are not always consistent. Uh, there are some fuzzy spots in the middle, or some that overlap each other a little bit. And as we mentioned when discussing roses ancient origins, species roses or those that existed naturally, old garden roses are in very basic terms, hybrids developed through cross pollinating species roses. The old garden group includes white Alba roses, which can include shades of creamy whites that also have some hints of soft pink, Demas roses and China roses. And then modern roses include hybrid tea roses, Flora bundas, and Grande Flora's, and we're going to talk about those types in just a moment. Gio made another significant contribution to rose history in eighteen seventy five when he introduced a Polyantha rose, which was a small compact plant that produced very tightly packed blooms. The Guillo family, by the way, continues to go roses from their families history as well as breed new roses in their nursery in France. Yeah they're in Urche's near the Belgian border. And all of this work done to create new plants with lush, multi layered blooms also resulted in plants that needed less shaping through pruning. Old garden roses were generally very hardy. They could survive in a lot of different soil conditions, and they could resist many pests and fungus, but newer roses continued to improve on those qualities, and as we just mentioned, modern roses also produced more flowers, whereas most old garden roses only bloomed in one season per year. The modern era of hybridization also led to advancements in color variation, so whereas shades in the spectrum of white to red where the most common and the rose population, hybridization leads to more and more colors. Yellow roses had been sought after in Europe for centuries, and there was some success in developing through grafting and improving a species from Turkey to produce double flowers. Today For example, you can find roses and shades of orange and apricot, dark purple's, multicolor varieties, and some that even approached black, although no true black rose has been created yet. No, they're definitely Nursery is hard at work on it. I guarantee you right this minute, because it's one of those things that people want. We all want a little gothic garden. I do. I have some very dark purples that I love, love, love, but they don't quite get black. Old garden roses really did have one particular area where they outpaced their hybridized modern cousins for quite some time, though, and that was with their aromatic sense. While the modern breeding of roses has produced flowers that smell like the seven scents that are normally associated with roses that include citrus, clove tea, violet apple, and nastritium, the classic rose scent of old garden roses, in particular was stronger than what you would smell necessarily in most rose scented flowers today, like that smell that you associate with roses, Although there is ongoing work to produce more and more fragrant roses. For a while in breeding beautiful things a roma was less important, but a lot of home gardeners have made it known that they would really like to have beautiful smelling flowers as well as beautiful looking flowers, so there is more breeding work going on to produce more fragrant blooms. Today, it is unknown how many different species of rose exists. Wild roses are difficult to track, and we don't know how many have survived through time, how many naturally hybridized and created new species, etcetera. Additionally, some species change genetically over time without hybridization, and some varieties raise a great deal of debate because they are so close to others, and people argue about whether they should be considered separate species. And walking back to the passage we read at the beginning of the episode, things can get incredibly contentious in the rose expert community. Yeah. Also, I mean, I don't even I'm sure there are people that do such things, but I don't even know how you would begin to try to catalog all of the existing roses on Earth. Hybrid tea roses make up the majority of roses that are grown in gardens today. The other groups of rose are the Flora bunda roses, which are crosses of hybrid tea roses and polyantha and grand of Flora roses, which are crossbreeds of hybrid tea roses and Flora Bundus. Roses of course also come in climbing varieties and shrubs and miniatures, but hybrid tea roses are the hardy ones that most gardens are going to have a lot of. If you have a home garden, you probably have that. If you have roses, We're gonna talk a bit about roses and food and medicine today. Rose Hips have been used as an edible for hundreds of years across many cultures. The hips are those bulbous, fruit like bumps that form at the end of a bloom after the petals have fallen off, and that's where the seeds develop. They start off green and they usually turn red as they make sure. Rose Hips are used to make tea, jelly and other foods, and then rose syrups are usually made from the oil distilled from the rose petals. Yeah, I'm gonna make rose jelly this year. I decided, Oh, that sounds because I have a lot of rose bushes at this point, and I might as well. But I had to do more research because like the the seeds, you want to hold out. One of the things that will come up if you look up whether or not roses or poisonous, they're generally not. Some people will mention that there is a minute amount of cyanide in the seeds, similar to the way there is a minute amount of cyanide in an apple seed. It's very scary when you see the word cyanide, but really there they're one. You are not eating the seeds. Theoretically too, if you did, it's a very tiny, tiny amount, but even so, be careful and take care of you. But I'm totally making rose jelly. But the other thing it's interesting about rose hips is that they are naturally very high in vitamin C, and so they are often used in cold and flute remedies. But there is a trick here because the process of drying the hips to produce medicine destroys a lot of their vitamin C content. So if you're purchasing like a rose hip based vitamin C item, a lot of the time they're supplemented with other sources because even after they're dried and made into a thing, the vitamin C that comes from the rose hips degrades pretty rapidly. It's also unclear how beneficial vitamin C really is, right, Uh. I know when I was in massage school slash working as a massage therapist, there were lots of complimentary and alternative medicine uses for roses and for rose oil and for rose water, and a lot of them had to do with like your minstrel cycle or childbirth. Uh. Yeah, I find rose things also just very very delicious, Like a good rose syrup in a cocktail is heaven to me? Heaven? I love it. Yeah. I love the fragrance of roses a lot. Uh, and it I find it to be very calming. It is. I like all of the cookie smelling roses, Like we have one that smells very heavily of clove and one that smells very heavily of citrus, And I just love them because they're so sort of I had not known prior to owning this house and those plants, one of which came with the house, that I was like, rose, this rose smells like oranges? What is that? I had never been exposed to a roses smell like oranges before seven years ago. Somehow make a chip to Atlanta when your roses are blooming, then uh yeah, that one we're right in the middle, like it hit through a bunch of blooms and then you know, I deadhead them because you pull the the bloomed bits off because if you have read, I need to do the science to back this up, but this is what I've read that if you let them develop their hips, they will stop blooming as much. So we pull the heads off and they're not. The plant is is getting the message that it should continue to bloom because it, you know, plants want to produce fruit. That's what it's doing, wants to to seed and propagate. But if all of this talk has inspired you to create your own rose, that is actually a thing that you can do. Amateur gardeners can cross breed this. San Francisco Gate actually has a really nice guide for amateur hybrid breeders that walks you through the whole process, and we're going to include that in the show notes. So if you think you would like to develop your own rooms, you can. Although there are lots and lots of expert gardeners and nurseries around the world constantly coming up with new and really beautiful and amazing roses, so probably you will not be competing with them, but you can make your own unique hybrid at home if you are patient. Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H