Early Records

The rose is the first flower whose perfume has been recorded. Undoubtedly many other scented flowers existed before those records were made, but, being inferior, they were disregarded. The historians of perfumery tell us also that the rose was the first flower from which any form of perfume was made, and that Avicenna, an illustrious Arabian doctor, discovered the art of extracting perfume from flowers by distillation. He made his first experiments on R. centifolia (the Cabbage Rose), and so invented rose-water. The sweetness of rose scent is mentioned by the earliest Greek and Roman writers.

Nature provides a plant with blossoms as part of its reproductive system. These flowers must attract insects, and in order that they may do so they have perfume and showy petals. Many sweetly scented roses have less attractive colouring; perhaps they do not need both, or perhaps they inherit the defect from some ancestor.

Fragrance is expected of roses, and it is one of their greatest attractions. A rose with only faint perfume is no less beautiful, but it is certainly less alluring. The truest, simplest, and least complex love of flowers is found in the man or woman who grows just a few plants of this and that, in a purely unscientific way, and does not know the names of more than two or three of them. Hand him or her a rose. There will be little caring for form. Size and colour will be admired, but before there will be time to express an opinion that bloom will have been smelt. Does that happen with a daisy, a dahlia, a hibiscus, a chrysanthemum, a camellia, or a gladiolus? Perfume is expected of a rose.

Perfume In Modern Roses

It is commonly said that modern roses lack the perfume of older sorts. Excluding R. damascena (Plate 63), such a statement does not stand investigation. It is extremely rare to find any modern rose scentless; there are a few, but there were also some among the old varieties. Actually some had distinctly unpleasant odours, for example R. foetida (Plate 3). This species has been responsible for altering the type of perfume in some roses of today. Their fragrance is no longer unpleasant but has definitely changed.

That beautiful white rose, Frau Karl Druschki, distributed by Lambert in 1900, is being held up continually as an example of the wicked modern rose, quite devoid of perfume. It is hardly modern, and the people who make these assertions forget that other roses of the same era (now half a century past), such as Captain Christy, Baroness Rothschild, and Crimson Bedder, were not only odourless but were also favourites. Probably the big white bloom is singled out because it outstayed all others of its time by many years. Its lack of fragrance is less typical of roses of today than of those of its own time of origin. Frau Karl Druschki has given us many very sweetly scented roses as progeny. Despite these many complaints (usually from people who know least about roses!) the public continues to favour colour and form rather than perfume when ordering new rose plants. Perfume comes with relevant chromosomes just as do all the other qualities of a rose, and, if popular demand were to warrant it, the hybridist could and would concentrate on intensification of perfume.

Although modern roses are just as rich in fragrance as the older types, few people realize that perfume has become more varied. Once the rich, sweet damask perfume was almost universal, differing only in intensity among popular roses from one sort to another. Then came the Tea Rose and its typical perfume. The hybridization of the two types brought the Hybrid Tea and a blending of the perfumes. Some of the progeny had nearly the damask perfume, some almost the tea perfume and the majority an intermediate type. Later, when the R. foetida cross was made, and the Pernetianas appeared, a further blending of perfume came. Fragrance is now very varied, ranging through degrees of damask, tea, and fruit odours to many types not yet classified. Have you not, on many occasions, entered a room and been aware of the presence of roses by their perfume, before you have seen them? How many of the varieties in that bowl or vase were more than twenty-five years old?

The damask perfume is represented today by such roses as Crimson Glory (Plates 5, 56), Rouge Mallerin, Royalist, Heart's Desire, Mirandy (Plates 24, 41), Shot Silk, Ophelia (Plate 12) and her family, Mrs Bryce Allan, William Orr (Plate 56), General MacArthur, Hadley, Radiance and its sports, Rose Marie, Red Ensign, Lumiere, Prinses Beatrix, Charles Mallerin, Wellworth, Monte Carlo, Venise Briarcliff (Plate 12), Dame Edith Helen (Plate 13), Tassin (Plate 53), Lorraine Lee, Malar Ros (Plate 39), William Harvey (Plate 40), William Moore, Rod Stillman, Suzon Lotthe (Plate 57), Mrs Henry Morse, Julie Strahl, and Baden Baden.

The tea scent is found in Poinsettia (Plate 12), Lady Hilling-don, Sunny South, Mme Jules Bouch£ (Plate 18), Souvenir de Mme Boullet, Golden Dawn, Mrs Harold Brocklebank, Mrs Dunlop Best, Golden Harvest, and others.

 The fruity scent is variable in type, most common among the Pernetianas and best exemplified in Angele Pernet, fitoile de Hollande, Mrs Sam McGredy, Brazil, Provence, Golden Emblem, and Rev. F. Page Roberts.

Oil Of Roses

Just as plants manufacture sap and chlorophyll, so do they make essential oils; these give flavour and scent and are found in the bloom, fruit, seeds, stem, root, bark, and leaf. We use them from the leaf in tobacco and eucalyptus, the bark in cinnamon and turpentine, the root in ginger and gentian, the stem in myrrh and quassia, the seeds in mustard and nutmeg, the fruit in pepper and anise, and the bloom in roses, violets, lavender, daphne, and the like.

Essential, or volatile, oils are highly aromatic, and sufficiently soluble in water to impart their odour and taste to it. In flowers they are mainly in the petals; there is a little in the pollen and stamens. They volatilize quickly and easily. Tiny particles are released under the influence of moisture, sun, light, changes of temperature, and maturity of the bloom. Some varieties of roses make more of these oils than others, and they differ slightly in composition; hence the variations in intensity and type of fragrance. Usually, the double roses hold their fragrance longer because more of the petal surfaces are hidden and the oil volatilizes more slowly.

As a bloom unfolds and exposes its pistil and stamens to insects for pollination, it not only increases its attractiveness by more fully displaying its colourful petals, but it becomes more strongly perfumed. Even indoors, roses increase their scent as they open. Blooms displayed on show benches have usually lost a great proportion of their fragrance, due to being kept in cool rooms and to being sprayed with water.

The fragrance of R. damascena (Plate 63) remains the most favoured. It is the sweetest and heaviest of all rose scents, and it is from this old rose that both the ancient and modern perfume manufacturers derive their essential oil, known as oil of roses, or attar of roses; the two names are synonymous. It is commonly called "old rose" perfume.

Many thousands of plants of R. damascena are grown in Bulgaria and India for the production of perfume, and a big industry has developed. One ton of petals of R. damascena will yield less than one and a quarter pounds of essential oil. The same weight of petals will give the following weights of rose oil from these varieties: Talisman 0.59 lb., Aroma 0.57 lb., Etoile de Hollande 0.51 lb., Briarcliff 0.42 lb., and Radiance 0.40 lb.; hence the great preference for R. dcmascena for perfumery. It takes nearly a million blooms of R. damascena to provide a ton of petals. To make one ounce of attar of roses about sixty thousand blooms are needed.

Rose petals are commonly used in and comprise the great bulk of •potpourri, made either commercially or at home.

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