The Origin of the first Bourbon roses are not very precise and most of it is based on speculations.

The island of Reunion was from 1643-1815 a french colony. The French named it Ile de bourbon.

Some farmers made hedges of roses along their landareas. The roses used were Old Blush (Parsons pink China) imported
from China and Autum damsk (Rose de quatre Saisons) from Europe.

In 1813 A French Botanist (M. Breon) found a different rose in one of the hedges. He took cuttings of the rose and 2 years later he sent roseseeds from the plant to France (to the Duke of Orleans head gardener, M. jaques).

Redoute painted roses from these seeds in 1822 and used the name Rosa canina "Borboniana" or "Rosier de ile de Bourbon".

In 1851 A french botanist ( Chaix) challenged this information about the origin. He claimed that the rose for a long time had been Grown on Ile de bourbon known as "Rose Edouard"/rose Edwards.

The Rose Historian Shepherds mention that the rose has been grown in a botanical garden in calcutta, India, a long time before it came to Europe. And he presumes the original Rose Edwards was extinct.

However the former Chairman of the Indian Rose Society (M.P.Pal) in his book "The Rose In India" (1966) writes that Rose Edwards is very common in Indian gardens, but also was used as rootstock. Rose Edwards had 2 indians syn. "Baramasi" and "Chenia". In 1966 Mr. Pal sent rose edwards to New Zealand to Nancy Steen and Trevor Griffith.
Trevor Griffith mentions this rose in his book as "Rose Edouard"

Notice that the French botanist M. Breon first sent seeds to France and later brought rooted cutting back to france in 1823. That means it mights as well have been 2 different roses.

So who know for sure? The First Bourbon Rose might be from India?

Oh boy, you are asking me to remember not only what I read, but where I read it?

The what is fairly straightforward. Instead of being a somewhat naturally occurring hybrid, that occurred on the island of Bourbon, there are people who think the original Bourbon rose was actually a much older hybrid that had been cultivated in India for a while. The rose was then brought as-is to Bourbon by one of many trading ships that stopped there from India. It's perfectly possible.

Running down the where may take a while.

Thank you for your responses. When I read that this rose was used to make a traditional herbal medicine in India some remaining little grey cells flashed. Thanks again!

Foghorn
NAGL

I have brought a "Rose Bourboniana", but it lookes as a Isaac Periere. Do you have a picture of your bourboniana. Yours Aksel Trige

I've always thought the Reunion story seemed suspiciously pat. The notion that it was reproduced from seed in France has always been preposterous. Each of the seeds would yield a different variety, some quite un-bourbonlike.

The kinship of bourbons to damasks is not at all obvious, except in scent. So maybe Rose Edoard was less than 50% damask parentage, which would contradict the Reunion story. The French genetic study of family relationships found that Bourbons have a higher proportion of China blood than, for example, Hybrid Perpetuals.

There were very old and active trade connections between Eastern Africa and India, with Arabs being the middlemen and establishing communities on the African coast going back to medieval times. There was substantial interest in roses in Arab cultures and also in Muslim India with its strong cultural connection to Persia; India would have had damask roses as well as Chinas (why were China roses called roses of Bengal?). To me it's quite plausible that the rose could have come from India, either by way of Arabs earlier or via French incursions in India during the 18th c. With the 19th c. rose boom in European culture, some of the French colonial planters would have been interested in gathering and propagating varieties from wherever that would grow in their climates.

Concerning the medicinal uses of roses:
At the Berkeley Botanical Gardens in the traditional Chinese Medicinal garden, are these roses, with placques telling what disease they treated;
R. arvensis. Extrordinarily beautiful when in bloom as it is grown on a ten foot tall pillar.
The Apothecary Rose, several bushes, which bloom very well despite the lack of winter chill.
R. rugosa, which are used for blood disorders.
They all bloom in June here, if you're ever in town and interested.
Culpepper mentioned 3 roses, one was the apothecary rose the other were merely described as "white" and "red",
Throughout the 1800's rose petals were used in France, for a variety of disorders including blood strengthening,
and a relative of Napoleans' ordered hundreds of jars of rose petal conserve in one year for stomach problems.

I've been looking for information on Ayurvedic uses of roses for a couple of weeks, nothing specific yet, just that they are used.

Luxrosa

I thought it was interesting that they let the mixture bake in the sun to cure. It looks like they have been using this medicine for some time. I might be silly enough to give it a try when it gets bloody hot here next month.

I wonder what rose was used before Rose Edoard?

Here is a link that might be useful: recipe

I see no problem with the idea that seeds from the chance cross found on Reunion were sent to M.Jacques and that he chose a seedling from their subsequent sowing and named it 'Le Rosier de l'Ile Bourbon'. Any seedling chosen would have been 'from Bourbon'.

The claim was later made that the rose (under the name 'Rose Edouard') had long been grown at the Calcutta Botanic Garden. This was, since its founding in 1787, an institution of the British East India Company. I would expect evidence of that rose growing in the garden to exist in either the 'Plants of the Coast of Coromandel' (published by the Company in 1795, 1802 and 1819), 'Hortus Bengalensis or A Catalogue of the Plants growing in the Honourable East India Company's Botanic Garden at Calcutta' (Serampore, 1814), or Roxburgh's 'Flora Indica'. (Roxburgh was Superintendent from 1793, and collected from all over India and the East, so certainly should have know such a 'commonly grown' rose). Or to have been noted by Sir Joseph Banks at Kew, who endorsed the Botanic Garden. Or in Sir Joseph Hooker's 'Flora of British India'.

No doubt someone has checked these? Like Michael, I love the wider historical possibilities. But I don't think the evidence we have for the Reunion story can be so lightly dismissed. I think there is next to no possibility that such a rose grew at Calcutta in a garden administered by British horticulturalists and was not dispatched immediately to Kew. Particularly since by this time China roses were being collected at Calcutta (in Bengal) for shipment to England.

One other matter that intruiges me is the thought that R. fedtschenkoana might have had an influence Eastward on the remontancy of China Roses as well as Westward on our Damasks . . . just an idle dream?

Best wishes
Jon

I just wanted to say that I agree with you completely about the Bourbon rose, Jon - but fedtschenkoana as a component of China roses?! I don't believe any genetic study of the genus has ever proposed a close relationship between the Indicae and the Cinnamomeae sections; meanwhile, however, Indicae and Synstylae have been all but "consectionalized" in recent research. Surely the China roses used in the studies would have given some hint at any introgression from fedtschenkoana's gene pool. I would like to see someone compare the genetic profile of continuous-blooming Chinas with that of the supposed wild, once-blooming Rosa chinensis, but I rather doubt that fedtschenkoana is much to blame for this particularly wonderful characteristic (admittedly it was blessed with a very auspicious location on the route between East and West!).

The only roses I know of that might be likely candidates for bestowing that kind of blooming mutation on the China are Rosa moschata, and perhaps Rosa multiflora if indeed it does have a repeat-blooming (but otherwise identical) form. As an aside, I would love to see more research to try to pin down the genetic placement of Rosa moschata within its section. We need to find its ancient homeland, wherever that may be.

Hi Stefan,

How surprised were you, then, to discover 'Olga's' part in the make-up of the Damasks? I know I was - perhaps that fuels my imagination :)

Best wishes
Jon

Probably not as surprised as I should have been - but I'm weird with a capital 'W', Jon :) I guess it's the breeder in me, I see how Cinnamomeae repeats on its new growth mostly from the base in most cases and have a hard time correlating that with the ability of a China to keep throwing new growth with buds from the axil below the last bloom. I think your brand of informed dreaming is great, though. Please keep doing it!

Stefan, you know a lot more about this stuff than I do, but don't rugosa (Cinn.) repeat from leaf axils?

I ran across a finding that R. Chinensis is a nearly sterile autotriploid. Unfortunately they don't give the provenance of their specimen, but they intend it to be the species.

Here is a link that might be useful: chromosome study

Yes, the rugosa will do that to some extent - although it's not exactly the same pattern as that of Rosa chinensis. Of course, and while I realize this doesn't change any arguments, rugosa is a far cry from the central Asian representatives of the section. There is actually mounting genetic and chemical evidence that it may be better positioned with R. roxburghii, much more distant from the cinnamon roses. I think that some repeating members of the section can and do a limited bit of throwing flowers from twiggy growth, but they do so very sparingly compared with the ever-growing, ever-blooming China. The reason for this may be due to the differences in genetic control over the once-blooming habit. Whereas limited summer repeat is probably due to incomplete once-blooming regulation (hormones get interrupted by weather, etc.), what we see in Chinas is a complete malfunctioning of any kind of control over blooming. In essence, without a gene telling the plant not to keep on blooming, it just doesn't know when to stop growing and setting flowers: genetic promiscuity.

Most repeat-blooming species probably accomplish repeat bloom differently on a genetic level. When we cross the species very complex genetic interactions result, so that two repeat-bloomers might have only once-blooming offspring, or two once-bloomers might have offspring that repeat; every permutation in between is quite possible depending on what's being combined. The genetic control might be very simple in some species, and very complex in others.

R. chinensis probably got its ability from a single mutation in a diploid gene, which became homozygous when that plant was selfed. If R. chinensis is a true, reproducing species and there is no evidence of genes from other species in it, it's quite possible the repeat bloom evolved independently in it. I would not consider an almost-sterile triploid to be a good representative of any species, but it is obvious that an autotriploid is a purely derived state - so wherever there's an autotriploid, there's also a diploid from which it came. Autotriploid means all three of its sets of chromosomes are from the same gene pool, and not the result of hybridization - so this would normally occur when an unreduced gamete (either sperm or egg) containing two copies of its chromosomes was mated with a gamete containing the more typical single copy. It doesn't really help us explain where the repeat bloom came from, unfortunately. Did you catch the bit about Rosa gallica being an allotetraploid? That's even more fascinating, because it means this species probably originated as a hybrid of two distinct species. This had already been studied previously, so this amounts to replication - and lends some much-desired credibility to the idea. Very cool!

"I would not consider an almost-sterile triploid to be a good representative of any species"

--I was wondering if this case had any bearing on the question of whether chinensis is a species in any normal sense-- if this specimen is a clone of one of the few actual plants taken to represent the species. I recognize that the question of species standing is taken to be settled in the affirmative after the discovery of some wild plants-- but then we hear they don't come true from seed, so I'm still puzzled. I would claim to be skeptical, but I'm not well informed enough to justify that word.

As to gallica being an interspecies hybrid, well, roses are such sluts, aren't they?

I'm sure there is a diploid species that represents the triploid the authors studied - if all three sets of chromosomes were truly of similar makeup, then it is certain that the plant originated from diploid parents of the same species. If you look at the old chromosome count listing of cultivars that's published on Paul Barden's web site, you'll see that most of the China roses listed are diploids with 14 chromosomes.

Depending on the source and context, saying that Rosa chinensis doesn't come true from seed may or may not be very meaningful. A species only needs to reproduce species characters (as defined by the author who first described the species) in order to be considered breeding "true"; it's not really the same as a cultivar, which needs to be identical in a much narrower sense in order to be considered breeding "true" from seed.

Roses are sluts - that's one of the reasons I like them so much. We swap lots of stories and the roses are good at keeping secrets ;)

Thanks. I knew that the cultivars we call Chinas are generally diploid. But could an autotriploid come from self-pollination by a diploid cultivar of no definite specieshood, as opposed to having two parents that are representatives of a species? In other words, could the doubling be a local abnormality or would it need to be part of the constitution of one freaky parent?

I don't know exactly what was meant by saying the wild Chinas didn't come true from seed, but I recall reading that the wild Chinas that were found were surprisingly diverse for a species population. Of course it would be hard to explain how they got in the woods if they were not an indigenous species.

It certainly could have been the result of a self-pollination by a cultivar. I doubt that researchers have access to anything but cultivars, actually - but since the species would undoubtedly have been described from a cultivar in the first place anyway, we're dealing with that as an original reference rather than whatever passes today for a "wild" type.

It doesn't really take a freaky parent to produce unreduced gametes - it's actually a very common occurrence and a certain percentage of pollen or egg cells can be expected to exist in that kind of state. Some plants do this much more than others, however, or have a wider variety of chromosome numbers in their gametes.

It could be that Rosa chinensis is just a very variable species - which is a great thing! We definitely need more research to determine the truth. Maybe the Chinese have gotten into it, but their research takes longer to filter through it seems.

Stefan, thank you for being patient with me :)

R. centifolia was described from a cultivar and considered a species at one point, but it seems to me it was never a species except from the postmodernist viewpoint that things are whatever we say they are. I understand why gallica is a species. Chinensis seems somewhere in between.

Corn or Zea mays mays is a collection of cultivars that share a morphology distinct from other subspecies of Zea mays, which are wild teosinte. So it's clear to me why Zea mays is a species and how corn belongs to it. I've just never been clear on how this applies to certain groups of roses.

There's no cause to be certain in this immature state of knowledge that Rosa chinensis is a species in the same way some other wild roses are believed to be species. It could easily be a complex hybrid of several other diploid species that appear to be closely allied. It's even possible that there may be one or more wild species that hasn't/haven't been adequately named and described because they were heretofore considered to fall under the umbrella of Rosa chinensis in all its variety.

Now, to see what kinds of problems botanists are faced with: go to the USDA's GRIN Taxonomy Database and search on "Rosa". Note that R. x odorata is listed instead of R. odorata (the underlying assumption being that it is a hybrid), noted as the possible cross between R. chinensis and R. gigantea. But the kicker is that there is no R. gigantea listed; only R. x odorata nothovar. gigantea, which would be impossible if we were to accept a premise of R. x odorata as a hybrid of gigantea. This isn't a criticism of the database, but rather, an illustration of the lack of evidence and the clash of what few assumptions we do have to work with. Consider next the questionable position of Rosa chinensis in our minds, and you begin to see just how confusing it all is.

I think I'm one of those people drunk on postmodern perspective when it comes to the issue of classification. Rosa gallica may be a species according to some definitions, but for my part I'd like to be able to qualify its species status with something more descriptive of where in the process of evolution it happens to be right now, which is certainly different from that of many other species. At one time, some people held the opinion that human-selected, modern Zea mays may have occurred only after some ancient tryst with another Zea species or even Tripsacum. It seems to me now from what I've read that its most believable origin is a series of discrete but phenomenally useful point mutations from a relatively useless wild species that were selected and propagated by humans. Fritos stand on the shoulders of some very mighty giants indeed.

Re: origin of the Musk rose mentioned upthread, one area that most definitely has indigenous WILD variants is the west-central Himalayas, above 6000 feet, in the oak-rhododendron forests [Quercus incana- R.arboreum (?)].

I have lived for years amidst the intoxicating fragrance of the single, 5-petalled pure white moschata type wild rose that bloomed in May-June, right after the oak dropped their leaves in late spring. The sun-warmed leaves and the roses are the smell of summer to me. I am sad that I never thought to collect seed, never believing of a permanent exile.