Monday, May 30, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm – Why the Rose, Online
This talk is the final lecture in a series sponsored by The Gardens Trust in association with the Historic Rose Group. £5. Register through Eventbrite HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
I ask the rose, ‘From whom did you steal that beauty?’ The rose laughs softly out of shame, but how should she tell? Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi.
In this talk, writer and horticultural historian Jennifer Potter sets out to answer the question posed by the Persian poet, mystic and scholar, Rumi, more than seven centuries ago. What makes the rose so special to so many cultures around the world? How to explain its transformation from a simple briar of the northern hemisphere into the western world’s favorite flower? Ranging widely across cultures and art forms, the talk tracks the rose’s shifting associations with love, sex, death and the great religions of East and West, overturning along the way many cherished rose myths.
When first approached by her publishers to write a book about the rose, Jennifer Potter secretly wondered if we really needed another book on the rose. Quickly hooked by this most potent of flowers, she spent the next five years researching and writing The Rose, A True History (Atlantic Books, 2010), embarking on a journey that took her from the rose fields of Iran to the White House Rose Garden. The author of four novels and six works of non-fiction, she wrote a celebrated biography of the John Tradescants: Strange Blooms, The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (Atlantic Books, 2006), and followed her book on the rose with Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World (Atlantic Books, 2013), which has been translated into Chinese.
