It is this delicious rose which Keats, when listening to the
nightingale, sensed rather than visualized in the twilight dimness:
The coming musk-rose full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
The musk-rose was adored by the Elizabethans. Lord Bacon considered its
scent to come next to that of the violet, and before all other flowers.
"You remember the great bush at the corner of the south wall just by
the Blue Drawing-room window?" writes Mrs. Gaskell in "My Lady Ludlow."
"That is the old musk-rose, Shakespeare's musk-rose, which is dying out
through the kingdom now. The scent is unlike the scent of any other
rose, or of any other flower."
The musk-rose is a native of North Africa, Spain, and India (Nepal).
Hakluyt in 1582 gave the date of its introduction into England. "The
turkey-cocks and hens," he says, "were brought in about fifty years
past; the Artichoke in the time of Henry the Eighth; and of later times
was procured out of Italy the Musk Rose plant and the Plum called
Perdigwena."
Turning now to Parkinson and opening his big volume at the page "_Rosa
Moschata_, simple and multiplex," we read:
"The Musk Rose, both single and double, rises up oftentimes to a very
great height that it overgroweth any arbor in a Garden, or being set
by a house side to be ten or twelve foot high, or more, but especially
the single kind with many green far spread branches armed with a few
sharp great thorns, as the wilder sorts of Roses are, whereof these
are accounted to be kinds, having small dark green leaves on them, not
much bigger than the leaves of Eglantines. The Flowers come forth at
the tops of the branches, many together as it were in an umbel, or
tuft, which, for the most part, do flower all at a time, or not long
one after another, every one standing on a pretty long stalk and are
of a pale whitish, or cream color, both the single and the double, the
single being small flowers consisting of five leaves with many yellow
threads in the middle; and the double bearing more double flowers, as
if they were once or twice more double than the single, with yellow
thrums also in the middle, both of them of a very sweet and pleasing
smell, resembling musk. Some there be that have avouched that the chief
scent of these Roses consisteth not in the leaves but in the threads of
the Flowers."
The color of the musk-rose is white, slightly tinged with pink.
EGLANTINE; ALSO SWEETBRIER (_Rosa eglanteria_). This is a conspicuous
adornment of _Titania's_ bower, and is as remarkable for its beauty as
for its scent. The pink flowers with their golden threads in the center
are familiar to every one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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