A Journey Through Gardens of West Asia and Beyond
Where Paradise Begins
Stand in the courtyard of a Persian garden at dawn, when the first light catches dewdrops on rose petals, and you’ll understand why the ancients called such places paradise. The word itself—paradise—comes from the Old Persian pairi-daeza, meaning “enclosed garden.” Here, in these walled sanctuaries where roses have grown for thousands of years, humanity learned something essential about beauty, impermanence, and the possibility of creating heaven on earth.
I’ve spent years chasing roses through history, following their trail from the wild mountainsides of ancient Mesopotamia to the manicured parterres of European estates, and what strikes me most is this: every culture that encountered the rose became obsessed with it. Not merely appreciative—obsessed. They built gardens around it, wrote poetry about it, distilled its essence, encoded it with religious meaning, waged wars partly to possess it, and passed down cultivation secrets through generations like precious heirlooms.
This is the story of those gardens, those obsessions, and the flower that has captivated us for five thousand years.
In the Beginning: Mesopotamian Dreams
The rose’s cultivation begins in shadow and legend, somewhere in the ancient Near East where wild roses scrambled up mountainsides and perfumed the air each spring. The Sumerians knew them. So did the Babylonians, who may have included roses in the Hanging Gardens—that wonder of the ancient world whose precise contents and even existence remain tantalizingly uncertain.
What we do know is that by 2000 BCE, roses were being grown deliberately, their petals collected for medicines and perfumes, their presence considered essential to temple gardens. These early cultivators discovered what every rose gardener since has learned: that roses demand attention, reward devotion, and somehow manage to seem both hardy and heartbreakingly fragile.
The pattern was set early—gardens as enclosed spaces, designed to exclude the harsh desert beyond. Gardens with water at their center, both practical and symbolic. Gardens where roses weren’t merely decoration but medicine, perfume, and a reminder that beauty could be cultivated even in difficult places.
The Persian Perfection: Where Roses Became Philosophy
If you want to understand what roses mean to human culture, you must go to Iran—or at least imagine it as it was during the Safavid and Qajar dynasties, when Persian gardens reached their zenith.
Picture the chahar bagh—the fourfold garden—laid out with mathematical precision. Four quadrants divided by water channels representing the four rivers of paradise. Roses planted in geometric patterns that please the eye and satisfy the mind’s hunger for order. Cypress trees punctuating the space like exclamation points, their dark verticals contrasting with the roses’ exuberant horizontals. Fruit trees adding another layer—practical, yes, but also laden with symbolism that every educated Persian could read like text.
In Kashan, the tradition of golab-giri—the rose harvest—transforms the entire region each May. For centuries, families have gathered before dawn to pick Rosa damascena blossoms, their petals still cool with night air, hauling them to copper stills where they’ll be transformed into rose water and rose oil. The scent is overwhelming, intoxicating, and if you’ve only encountered rose perfume in department stores, you have no idea what you’re missing. This is rose as it was meant to be experienced—dense, complex, earthy and ethereal simultaneously.
But the Persians didn’t just grow roses. They wove them into poetry until the rose and the nightingale became the culture’s central metaphor for love—the nightingale forever singing to the rose, the rose forever beautiful and indifferent and necessary. Hafez and Rumi wrote of roses as simultaneously earthly and divine. In Persian gardens, roses weren’t mere plants; they were living philosophy, reminders of beauty’s transience and its eternal recurrence.
The Fin Garden in Kashan, the Eram Garden in Shiraz—these UNESCO World Heritage sites offer glimpses of this tradition, though both have been restored and altered over centuries. Walking their paths, you sense the ghosts of countless garden parties, poetry recitals, philosophical debates conducted under rose-covered trellises while water music played from the fountains.
The Islamic Synthesis: When Gardens Conquered Continents
As Islamic civilization expanded, it carried Persian garden arts to new territories, adapting them to different climates, aesthetics, and purposes. The result was one of history’s great cultural syntheses.
In al-Andalus—medieval Islamic Spain—Persian principles met Mediterranean reality. The gardens of Granada’s Alhambra and Generalife represent this fusion at its finest. Here, Moorish architects created spaces that manipulate every sense: the sound of water splashing in channels and fountains, the interplay of light and shadow through carved screens, the scent of roses and jasmine hanging in enclosed courtyards.
These weren’t vast gardens—the Alhambra’s courtyards are intimate, human-scaled—but they achieved something remarkable. They created microclimates where roses that should have struggled in Spanish heat found shelter and thrived. The raised beds provided drainage; the high walls created shade; the omnipresent water cooled the air. Every design choice served multiple purposes, aesthetic and practical so intertwined as to be inseparable.
The Court of the Lions, with its famous fountain supported by marble lions, was once surrounded by roses. The Court of the Myrtles offered different sensory experiences—the sharp scent of myrtle contrasting with roses’ sweetness, the still water of the reflecting pool offering mirror images of the palace above.
Meanwhile, in Central Asia, Silk Road cities developed their own rose traditions. Samarkand and Bukhara became legendary for their gardens, and Timur—better known in the West as Tamerlane—reportedly collected rose varieties from across his vast, violently-won empire. His garden in Samarkand was described by ambassadors and travelers with wonder verging on disbelief: hundreds of rose varieties, thousands of bushes, a botanical collection that represented conquest transformed into cultivation.
Ottoman Opulence: Roses on the Bosphorus
The Ottoman Empire inherited multiple garden traditions—Persian, Byzantine, and increasingly, European—and synthesized them into something distinctly Turkish. In Istanbul, gardens descended in terraces toward the Bosphorus, offering views that combined natural beauty with imperial architecture.
The Topkapi Palace gardens once contained extensive rose collections, though much has been lost or altered over the palace’s long transition from imperial residence to museum. What remains suggests the scope: different garden areas for different purposes, some public, some intensely private; roses trained on pergolas overlooking the water; varieties collected from across the empire’s vast territories.
Interestingly, the rose’s dominance was briefly challenged during the early 18th century’s “Tulip Era,” when Ottoman elites became obsessed with tulip cultivation. But roses never truly lost their place. They were too deeply rooted in garden tradition, too useful for perfume and rose water, too symbolically important to be displaced by even the most spectacular tulips.
Today, Istanbul’s Gülhane Park—once part of Topkapi’s grounds—offers the most accessible rose garden experience in the city. It’s not what it once was, but on a spring evening, walking among the roses while the call to prayer echoes from nearby mosques and ferries horn on the Bosphorus, you can still sense the continuum of garden culture stretching back through centuries.
The real heir to Ottoman rose tradition may be Isparta, the southwestern city that became Turkey’s rose oil capital. Here, Rosa damascena cultivation isn’t historical recreation but living industry. The annual Rose Festival celebrates both heritage and commerce, as rose oil from Isparta reaches perfume houses worldwide. The surrounding countryside, with its lake-district climate of cool nights and warm days, proves ideal for roses—as it has for centuries.
Mughal Magnificence: Gardens in the Mountains
The Mughal emperors, descended from Timur and culturally Persian, created perhaps the most spectacular rose gardens in history when they turned their attention to Kashmir.
The Kashmir Valley, with its cool climate, abundant water, and dramatic mountain backdrop, offered ideal conditions for rose cultivation. The Mughals recognized this and built accordingly. Shalimar Bagh, Nishat Bagh, Chashme Shahi—these gardens represent the Persian chahar bagh adapted to Himalayan topography, cascading down mountainsides in a series of terraces connected by water channels and dotted with pavilions.
Contemporary accounts from Mughal chroniclers describe these gardens in their prime: thousands of rose bushes in geometric beds, their colors arranged in patterns that changed with perspective as visitors descended from terrace to terrace. Roses mixed with iris and poppies, with fruit trees providing shade and harvest. The symbolism was multilayered—paradise achieved through human effort, beauty wrested from mountain wilderness, imperial power expressed through horticultural virtuosity.
The nightingale-and-rose motif, so central to Persian poetry, took on new dimensions here. Actual nightingales sang in these gardens (they still do), their songs mixing with the sound of rushing water and the rustle of wind through plane trees.
The Taj Mahal’s garden, though modified over centuries, deserves mention as perhaps history’s most famous funerary rose garden. The charbagh surrounding Shah Jahan’s monument to his wife Mumtaz Mahal once featured extensive rose plantings flanking the central water channel. The symbolism was profound and intentional: the garden represented paradise, the white marble tomb represented eternal love, and the roses—ephemeral, beautiful, thorned—represented earthly existence. Walking from the garden toward the tomb was meant as a journey from temporal to eternal, from earth to heaven.
The Western Transformation: How Europe Claimed the Rose
Medieval Europe’s relationship with roses began modestly, in monastery herb gardens where Rosa gallica varieties were grown primarily for medicine. The Apothecaries’ Rose became standardized across Europe, its petals dried for treatments ranging from digestive complaints to skin conditions. These weren’t gardens in the Persian sense—they were practical plots, organized by use rather than aesthetics.
The Crusades changed everything. Returning knights and pilgrims brought Rosa damascena and other Eastern varieties to Europe, along with stories of the gardens they’d seen. Suddenly, roses weren’t just medicine; they were luxury goods with exotic associations.
The Renaissance saw European nobility begin creating ornamental rose gardens influenced by both classical Roman models and, increasingly, reports from Ottoman and Persian territories. The Medici gardens in Florence collected roses alongside other botanical curiosities. French châteaux developed the structured parterres that would become characteristic of European formal garden design.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, dedicated rose gardens—rosaraies—appeared, spaces devoted entirely to rose cultivation and display. This represented a shift in thinking: roses as luxury items, status symbols, objects of aesthetic contemplation separate from any practical purpose.
The real revolution, though, came in the late 18th century when Chinese roses reached Europe. These varieties brought something European and West Asian roses largely lacked: remontancy, the ability to bloom repeatedly throughout the growing season rather than just once in spring. The hybridization that followed created modern rose classes—hybrid perpetuals, hybrid teas, and eventually the vast array of modern roses.
This changed rose gardens fundamentally. Suddenly, gardens could feature continuous color from spring through fall. Design possibilities multiplied. The modern rose garden, with its beds of hybrid teas blooming in waves throughout summer, was born from this East-meets-West botanical exchange.
The Victorian Apotheosis: Roses as Empire
The 19th century represented peak rose mania in Europe and America. The Victorians, with their passion for collecting, categorizing, and displaying, took to roses with characteristic intensity. Rose breeding became both science and competitive sport. Rose gardens proliferated in public parks, private estates, and middle-class gardens.
This was also the era when rose gardens became deliberately historical, attempting to recreate or reference earlier garden styles. The arts and crafts movement looked back to medieval and Tudor gardens, creating “old-fashioned” rose gardens planted with heritage varieties. Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson advocated for more naturalistic rose plantings, moving away from rigid Victorian formality toward mixed borders where roses mingled with perennials and shrubs.
The rose’s symbolic importance in this era can hardly be overstated. Roses represented refinement, cultivation, civilization itself. They were imperial flowers, exported from European nurseries to colonial gardens worldwide, imposing European aesthetics on landscapes from India to Australia to South Africa.
Modern Times: Roses in a Changing World
Today’s rose gardens exist in tension between tradition and contemporary realities. In West Asia, ancient rose-growing regions face challenges unimaginable to previous generations.
Iran maintains its rose heritage despite economic sanctions and political isolation. The golab-giri ceremonies continue in Kashan, though increasingly threatened by water scarcity and urban sprawl. Tehran’s botanical gardens preserve historical varieties alongside modern cultivars, engaged in quiet but crucial conservation work. Young Iranians post photos of rose harvest on Instagram, tradition meeting technology in unexpected ways.
Turkey’s Isparta region balances commercial rose oil production with tourism and heritage preservation. The annual Rose Festival has become both celebration and economic driver, attracting visitors who want to experience rose harvest firsthand.
In the Gulf states, where oil wealth meets extreme climate, roses present both challenge and opportunity. Dubai’s Miracle Garden—controversial for its water consumption—demonstrates that modern technology can create gardens almost anywhere. Its 45 million flowers include extensive rose plantings maintained through drip irrigation and climate control. Critics question the sustainability; admirers point out the deep cultural importance of gardens in desert cultures, the human need for beauty regardless of practicality.
Jordan, Lebanon, and other Levantine countries incorporate roses into contemporary landscape design, often mixing Mediterranean native plants with traditional roses in ways that honor heritage while acknowledging water constraints.
Europe’s great rose gardens face different challenges. Many are re-examining practices in light of climate change and environmental concerns. The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden was redesigned in 2016 with sustainability as a primary concern—less water, fewer chemicals, more companion planting, heritage variety preservation.
The Europa-Rosarium in Sangerhausen, Germany, maintains approximately 8,700 varieties, serving as living library of rose history. Walking its grounds is like reading a botanical chronicle—from ancient species roses through medieval varieties to Victorian hybrids to cutting-edge modern cultivars.
Portland’s International Rose Test Garden, America’s oldest public rose garden, has become a center for developing disease-resistant varieties suited to changing climate patterns. The emphasis has shifted from pure aesthetics to roses that can thrive with minimal intervention—a return, interestingly, to something closer to the hardy heritage roses that grew in ancient Persian gardens.
Design Philosophies: East and West
The fundamental difference between Persian-Islamic and European rose garden design lies in their relationship to geometry and nature.
Persian gardens impose rigid geometric order—the chahar bagh with its fourfold symmetry, its water channels intersecting at perfect right angles. But within that order, they create spaces that feel organic, alive, responsive to climate and topography. The geometry serves the garden’s function as microclimate, as sensory experience, as symbolic representation of paradise. Roses are planted in patterns, yes, but the patterns facilitate maintenance, maximize fragrance distribution, create visual rhythms that guide movement through the space.
European formal gardens also employ geometry, but often in ways that feel more about imposing human order on nature. The parterres of French châteaux, the knot gardens of English estates—these demonstrate control, mastery, civilization triumphant over wilderness. Roses become elements in larger compositions, their individual characteristics sometimes secondary to their role in the design.
The 20th century saw various attempts to bridge these approaches. The English cottage garden style allowed roses to grow more naturally, mixed with perennials and herbs, creating spaces that felt abundant rather than controlled. Contemporary sustainable design tries to honor both aesthetic traditions while incorporating native plants, wildlife habitat considerations, and climate-appropriate selections.
The most successful modern rose gardens seem to be those that understand their specific place and history. A rose garden in Kashmir should look different from one in Portland, should reference different traditions, should work with rather than against its climate and culture.
The Symbolic Rose: Meanings Across Cultures
Why has the rose maintained its hold on human imagination across such diverse cultures and millennia?
Part of the answer lies in the flower’s physical characteristics—the perfection of its symmetry, the intensity of its fragrance, the softness of its petals contrasted with the sharpness of its thorns. These qualities lend themselves to metaphor. The rose becomes whatever we need it to be: love, beauty, transience, danger, passion, purity, the divine made manifest in nature.
In Persian and Sufi Islamic tradition, the rose represents divine beauty, the soul’s longing for union with God. The nightingale’s song to the rose symbolizes the mystic’s yearning for spiritual transcendence. The rose’s brief blooming period reminds us that beauty and life itself are fleeting—carpe diem encoded in petals.
In Christianity, the rose became associated with the Virgin Mary (especially white roses) and with martyrdom (red roses representing blood and sacrifice). Medieval Mary gardens featured roses as centerpieces, surrounded by other flowers with Marian associations.
In secular Western culture, the rose became so associated with romantic love that it’s now almost cliché—and yet the association persists because it still works. We still give roses to lovers, plant them at weddings, lay them on graves. The language of roses—different colors meaning different things—may be largely Victorian invention, but it speaks to our desire for flowers to carry messages beyond words.
What’s remarkable is how the rose’s meanings, while varying across cultures, share common threads. Everywhere, the rose represents something precious, beautiful, worthy of cultivation and preservation. Everywhere, it reminds us of impermanence—the petals will fall, the bloom will fade. And everywhere, it suggests that beauty itself is worth pursuing, worth the effort of creation and maintenance, worth building gardens around.
Practical Wisdom: Creating and Maintaining Rose Gardens Today
If you’re inspired to create a rose garden—whether a single bush or an elaborate design—what should you know?
First, understand your climate and choose roses accordingly. The greatest historical mistake in rose growing has been attempting to force roses suited to one climate into completely different conditions. Persian varieties developed over centuries for hot, dry climates with cold winters. European varieties evolved for moderate temperatures and consistent moisture. Modern breeders have created roses for almost every condition, but you must choose wisely.
In hot, dry climates—much of West Asia, the American Southwest, Australia—look for heat-tolerant varieties with lower water needs. Heritage roses like Rosa damascena and various gallica hybrids often outperform fussy modern hybrid teas. They’ve survived for centuries because they’re tough, adapted, resilient.
In Mediterranean climates, you have more options. Both European classics and Persian heritage varieties can thrive. The key is summer water management and choosing varieties with good disease resistance in humid conditions.
In continental climates with harsh winters, you need cold-hardy varieties. Many English roses, rugosa hybrids, and Canadian-bred roses handle extreme cold better than hybrid teas. Consider protecting tender varieties or treating them as annuals.
Second, think about disease resistance. The traditional hybrid tea rose garden, with its beds of bush roses requiring regular spraying for black spot and powdery mildew, represents an outdated approach. Modern breeding has created roses with strong disease resistance, and many heritage varieties are naturally tough. Choose resistant varieties, provide good air circulation, practice good sanitation (removing diseased leaves promptly), and avoid overhead watering.
Third, consider the garden’s purpose and your aesthetic goals. Do you want a formal design referencing historical styles? A cottage garden abundance? A cutting garden for bouquets? A sustainable landscape that requires minimal maintenance? Each approach suggests different rose selections and designs.
For historical authenticity, research roses that would have been available in your chosen period. Organizations like the Heritage Rose Foundation maintain databases of antique varieties and their characteristics. Many old roses are surprisingly available from specialty nurseries.
For low maintenance, focus on shrub roses and once-blooming heritage varieties that don’t require deadheading, pruning, or chemical treatments. Accept that one spectacular bloom period may be preferable to continuous fussing for repeat blooms.
For continuous color, modern repeat-blooming roses are essential. But choose carefully—many modern varieties sacrifice fragrance for other traits. If scent matters to you (and in the context of historical rose gardens, it should), seek out fragrant varieties even if it means fewer blooms.
Fourth, think about companion planting. Roses in isolation often look awkward. In Persian gardens, they were mixed with fruit trees, cypress, and bulbs. In cottage gardens, they mingle with lavender, catmint, and perennials. The companions serve practical purposes (lavender may help with pest control) and aesthetic ones (purple catmint makes pink roses glow).
Finally, embrace imperfection. The most beautiful rose gardens aren’t those maintained to exhibition standards but those that feel alive, lived-in, loved. A few black-spotted leaves, some spent blooms you haven’t yet deadheaded, the occasional Japanese beetle—these are signs of a real garden, not a problem to be solved with chemical warfare.
Conservation Challenges: Preserving Rose Heritage
We’re losing rose varieties faster than we’re creating new ones. This seems counterintuitive given the thousands of new roses introduced annually, but it’s true.
Many heritage varieties—roses that grew in Persian gardens, that scented Mughal terraces, that climbed cottage walls for generations—exist now only in small collections or have vanished entirely. They were replaced by modern varieties, lost to war and political upheaval, abandoned when old gardens were destroyed or redesigned.
Organizations like the Heritage Rose Foundation work to preserve these varieties, but it’s challenging work. Unlike seeds, which can be stored in seed banks, roses must be maintained as living plants, propagated regularly, distributed to multiple locations to guard against loss. It requires land, labor, expertise, and ongoing funding.
Some heritage varieties survive in unexpected places—old cemeteries, abandoned homesteads, elderly gardeners’ yards. “rose rustlers” hunt for these survivors, taking cuttings, identifying varieties, bringing them into preservation programs.
Climate change adds urgency to conservation efforts. Regions that have grown particular rose varieties for centuries may become unsuitable for them. The traditional rose-growing areas of Iran face increasing water scarcity and extreme heat. Cold-hardy varieties may need to shift northward as winters warm.
At the same time, preservation offers hope. Botanical gardens worldwide maintain rose collections. DNA analysis helps identify varieties and understand relationships. Tissue culture allows rapid propagation of rare varieties. Social media connects collectors and enthusiasts across borders.
The roses that grew in ancient Babylon are lost to us, but some Persian varieties have survived for a thousand years or more. With effort, they can survive another thousand.
A Journey Worth Taking: Visiting Historic Rose Gardens
There’s something about experiencing historic rose gardens in person that no photograph or description can capture. The way light moves through a space. The sound of water. The intensity of fragrance when you round a corner and encounter hundreds of blooms. The sense of continuity—knowing that gardeners have tended this space, these very plants or their descendants, for decades or centuries.
If you can, visit the Eram Garden in Shiraz during May, when roses bloom and the scent hangs heavy in the Persian air. Walk slowly, notice everything—how the water channels create rhythm, how cypress trees frame views, how the garden reveals itself gradually as you move through it.
Visit the Alhambra at dawn, before tour groups arrive, when you can stand in the Court of the Myrtles and hear only fountains and birds. Try to imagine roses where restored plantings now stand. Consider what this place meant to the people who created it, what it represented about paradise and power and the possibility of beauty in a precarious world.
Visit Kashmir’s Mughal gardens in late spring or early autumn, when roses bloom against the backdrop of Himalayan peaks. Sit in one of the pavilions and watch sunset paint the mountains pink and gold while roses perfume the cooling air.
Visit Sangerhausen’s Europa-Rosarium in Germany and spend hours wandering among roses from every period and place, from medieval Europe to modern China. Read the labels, note the differences, observe which roses seem most alive and healthy, which struggle, which persist despite age.
Visit Portland’s Rose Test Garden on a foggy June morning and watch the city emerge from mist while surrounded by thousands of blooming roses. This is rose gardening as civic project, as public gift, as statement that beauty matters even (especially) in contemporary urban life.
Each garden teaches different lessons. Each represents different choices, different climates, different cultural values, different moments in history. Collectively, they demonstrate what we’ve done with one flower over millennia—how we’ve shaped it and been shaped by it, how we’ve encoded our hopes and beliefs and aesthetics into cultivation practices and design principles.
The Rose Garden as Metaphor
Perhaps the deepest reason for the rose garden’s persistence across cultures and centuries is that it works as metaphor for something essential about human experience.
A rose garden represents effort rewarded. Roses are not easy plants—they require pruning, feeding, protection, attention. They repay this care with beauty and fragrance, but the beauty is temporary. The petals fall. The season ends. And next year, you must do it all again.
This mirrors life itself. We invest effort in relationships, projects, ourselves, knowing that nothing lasts forever, that beauty and success and even life itself are temporary. We do it anyway. We tend our gardens.
A rose garden represents order imposed on chaos. The wild rose scrambles through forests, blooms briefly, spreads where it will. The garden rose grows where we plant it, blooms when we want it to (mostly), shapes itself to our vision (with persuasion). We take something wild and make it ours, not destroying its essential nature but channeling it, focusing it, enhancing it. This is what human culture does—takes raw possibility and shapes it into forms that please us, that carry meaning, that express values and ideas.
A rose garden represents connection across time. When you plant a Rosa damascena variety that grew in Kashan centuries ago, you connect yourself to all those anonymous gardeners who kept that variety alive through wars and droughts and changes of dynasty and religion and political system. You become a link in the chain. You accept responsibility for passing this beauty forward to whoever comes next.
And a rose garden represents hope. You don’t build a garden if you’ve given up on the future. Gardens are inherently optimistic acts—you plant knowing you may not see full maturity, trusting that someone will care for what you’ve started, believing that beauty matters enough to justify the effort.
In a world of environmental crisis, political upheaval, cultural fragmentation, and rapid technological change, the rose garden persists as a statement: beauty is still possible. Tradition still matters. The natural world still deserves our attention and care. We can still create spaces that nourish our spirits while respecting the earth’s limits.
This is why people still plant roses, still visit gardens, still write about them and photograph them and dream about them. This is why preservation efforts matter. This is why a flower that humans have cultivated for five thousand years still seems fresh, still seems necessary, still seems like something worth building a garden around.
Your Own Rose Garden
You don’t need a Persian palace or a Kashmir mountainside to create a rose garden. A single fragrant rose in a pot on an apartment balcony connects you to this history. Three heritage roses in a corner of your yard, chosen for fragrance and disease resistance, watered sustainably, allowed to bloom and rest according to their nature—that’s a rose garden.
What matters isn’t scale but intention. What matters is choosing plants suited to your place, tending them attentively, taking pleasure in their beauty, accepting their impermanence, and—if you’re fortunate—passing them along to whoever comes next.
The gardeners of ancient Persia understood something we’re still learning: that gardens are never truly finished, that perfection is neither achievable nor the point, that the work itself—the tending, the observing, the adjusting, the hoping—is where meaning lives.
So plant roses. Choose them carefully, place them thoughtfully, care for them well. Watch them bloom and fade and bloom again. Let them teach you about beauty and effort, transience and continuity, nature and culture, past and future.
Welcome to a tradition thousands of years old and always beginning again, as fresh and hopeful as tomorrow’s first rose opening to the morning sun.