ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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The rose is the flower of the rose, shrub of the genus Rosa and of the family Rosaceae. The rose of the gardens is characterized above all by the multiplication of its nested petals, which gives it its characteristic shape.

Appreciated for its beauty and smell, it has been celebrated since Antiquity by many poets and writers as well as by painters, for its perfume and for its colours which range from pure white to dark purple, passing through yellow and all intermediate shades. It is present in almost all gardens and in many bouquets. She became the "Queen of Flowers" in the Western world.

Rose is one of the most cultivated plants in the world and is the leading flower market. But roses are also wild plants (the best-known in Europe is legtler) with simple five-petalled flowers, which have become fashionable, for their more natural appearance, under the name of "Botanical Roses".

The cultivated roses are the result of several millennia of transformations, first empirical then, from the end of the , methodical, especially by hybridization. There are countless varieties, and it is estimated that more than three thousand cultivars are currently available in the world.

History

The poets Hesiod, Archiloque de Paros at the , Anacreon de Teos already sang it. Then Theophraste, in the 17th century, spoke the first of the cultivation of rose in his book Des odors et Histoire des plants, where, in Book I, he spoke of rose as a sub-arbrisseau. In Book II, he writes that they reproduce by stem fragments; in Book IV, comparing its buds with those of grenades; in Book VI of Plant History, where he defines it as a sub-arbrisseau and a bushy plant, and links the fragrance of roses to their terroir and Book IX, to put the colour of laurel-rose in comparison with that of rose. It includes all roses () under the name of "wild".

Origin
The word rose, attested in French at the beginning of the 19th century, dates back to Latin , a female substantive which referred to both the flower and the rose itself.

On the other hand, the etymology of the Latin word rosa is controversial: Friedrich Max Müller opposed a supposed Semitic origin of the word rosa, or the omission by Emile Littré of the Arabic award(a) "flower(s)", wardi "pink" in favour of the Sanskrit vrad, while the latter word means "soften".

Still it is that some attach the Latin word to the ancient Greek, "the rose", eolic wrodion, himself, it is said, borrows from an old Persian owurdi, comparable to the var-a, sogdien-ward, parthe-wâr, all in the sense of "pink". And still according to this same thesis, the old Persian also came out of the Semitic root, which is found in the Wurrdā or the Wurtinnu Assyrian for example. Thus the Persian word, where the Persian gol, would proceed from an Indo-European root owr-dho continued in Latin by ru