White Rose

The white rose is the pale-flowered form of the cultivated rose (Rosa), and its symbolism turns on its colour: whiteness has made it, across European tradition, the flower of purity, innocence and spiritual love, as against the passion of the red. In Christian devotion the white rose is an emblem of the Virgin Mary, the rosa mystica, and the very word rosary records a garland of roses offered to her in prayer. The rose was sacred to Venus in the classical world, and Culpeper accordingly placed roses under that planet, the ruler of love and beauty.

The white rose most often meant in older herbals and heraldry is Rosa alba, a hardy, sweetly scented old garden rose distinct from the wild dog rose and from the modern hybrid tea, its exact parentage still debated by rose historians though it is thought to combine Rosa damascena with a wild ancestor. Distilled rosewater and the concentrated oil called attar or otto of roses, produced above all in Bulgaria's Rose Valley near Kazanlak since Ottoman times, carried the flower's fragrance into perfumery and cookery, and in the Islamic world into the ceremonial washing of the Kaaba in Mecca, a genuine ritual use recorded by pilgrims and historians of the site.

The rose carried a distinct meaning of secrecy: a rose hung above a table meant that what was said beneath it was confidential, the origin of the Latin tag sub rosa, under the rose, still used for things spoken in confidence. In English history the white rose became a dynastic badge, the emblem of the House of York in the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses against the red rose of Lancaster, the two later combined in the Tudor rose, and it was afterward taken up as a Jacobite token. Layered onto a single pale flower, then, are purity and the Virgin, love and Venus, silence and confidence, and the fortunes of a royal house.

The flower's association with secrecy and the sacred met in stone in the great rose windows of Gothic cathedrals, circular stained-glass windows named for their petal-like tracery and often centred on an image of the Virgin, so that the architecture of a building could itself be read as an enormous rose. In the Victorian language of flowers a white rose sent alone meant I am worthy of you, or, in a starker reading, silence, an echo of the old sub rosa custom surviving into a wholly secular code of courtship, one more layer added to a flower already carrying purity, Mary, Venus and a royal house.