“According to Milton we owe our prickly roses to the Fall of
Man. This is an insight shared by others long before his time, for St Ambrose
in the 4th century AD was equally sure that roses are smooth in
Paradise, while the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia held that no thorns existed before
Ahriman, the spirit of evil, came into the world.
“Unappealing they may be, yet even prickles can be a pretty
adornment, as anyone who has seen young shoots on the Wing Thorn rose will
know. What these stories illustrate is the abiding fascination with roses that
overrides boundaries of time and place, drawing people of many nations to write
about roses, to grow them, depict them in all sorts of ways, and above all to
love them.”
From a foreword by Peter Harkness in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Roses, Mary Moody, ed. Headline Books, London. 1993.
