Brooklyn Botanic Garden is just several strops from
Manhattan. It is the best place to see
the flowering magnolia trees in the beginning of the spring. The garden was founded in 1910. Every year there
are about a million visitors from all
over the world. In my previous posts I told
about the garden and about its' bonsai
collection. But June is a rose month! Collection of roses in Brooklyn Botanic garden
is one of the largest in the country and
in June roses are in full bloom.
The rose (Latin, rosa, in Greek, rhodon) is a sacred symbol
of regeneration, purity, virginity, fertility, sexuality, secrets, and most of
all, love. Robert Burns , English poet of the 18th century, wrote:
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Love is like the melody
That’s sweetly played in tune
It is believed that roses were grown in all the early civilizations
at least 5000 years agoRose fragments have
often been found inside burial tombs.
In Greek mythology, the rose with five petals became the
five-pointed star (pentagram or pentacle) of the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite and
the red petals of the rose are the blood of Lord Adonis. The ancient Roman
festival called “Rosalia” was part of the cult of the dead from the first
century. In Alchemy red and white roses enter into the general red/white
duality symbolizing the primer elements sulphur and mercury.
White Rose and Red Rose become first in the European history
political symbol of fight for power. The War of Roses ended in 1485 with arise
of new power - house of Tudor when Henry Tudor won the throne of England and
united the red rose of Lancaster with the white rose of York.
On November 20, 1986, President Ronald Reagan, signed
Proclamation 5574 declaring the Rose to be The National Floral Emblem of the
United States of America. Each of the 50 states has also adopted an official
state flower, including the rose in New York, the Oklahoma rose in Oklahoma,
the Cherokee rose in Georgia, and the wild prairie rose in Iowa and North
Dakota.
Ornamental roses have been cultivated for millennia, with
the earliest known cultivation known to date from at least 500 BC in
Mediterranean countries, Persia, and China. The predecessor
of the modern rose garden was planted by the French empress Joséphine de
Beauharnais, the wife of Napoléon
Bonaparte at Château de Malmaison in the
years between . At her death in 1814, the garden included more
than 250 varieties of roses.
In 1927, Walter V. Cranford, a construction engineer whose
firm built many of Brooklyn's subway tunnels, donated $15,000 to BBG for a rose
garden. Excavation revealed an old cobblestone road two feet below the surface
and tons of glacial rock, which had to be carted away on horse-drawn barges.
There are over 5,000 bushes of nearly 1,400 kinds of roses,
including wild species, old garden roses and hybrid
tea roses. And right now the roses, of
every shade from white to pink to that
perfect deep red are flowering in all their glory - so now is the time to visit, before, as they
say, the bloom is off the rose….
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