Part Two: Old roses for Chateau de Courtomer

*Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…for roses keep blooming amid the collapse of civilisation...*

Chère ami, cher ami,

“Mes tot ausi come la rose est plus que nule autre flors bele,
Qant ele neist fresche et novele,”

quoted our neighbor Reynald, raising his tortoise shell glasses to better press his long and pointed nose into the center of a rose.

The citation is from a minor poem of the famous Christian de Troyes, a “trouvère” or medieval poet. It was written around 1176, about 130 years after Chateau de Courtomer’s first walls were erected.

“Just as the rose than no other flower is beautiful,
when she is fresh and new,”

he translated, in case we didn’t understand the Old French. He sneezed.

It was a dewy morning. Droplets balanced on the petals of the rose, as fragile as tiny balloons.

Reynald pulled out his mouchoir and polished his glasses.

La Rose blanchit tout autour
Au matin de perles petites,
Qu'elle emprunte du poinct du jour.

The rose whitened all about
by tiny pearls borrowed from
the rising of the sun.

Reynald, professor of Histoire at the Sorbonne, spends his weekends in the calm countryside of the Orne. It is his nidus senectutis, the nest of his old age, as noble Romans of the Classical Age also liked to say.

“Those lines are a translation from our great poet of the Third century, Ausone,” he continued, ever attentive to our edification. “He wrote in Latin, of course. But the great Ronsard had le bon goût to borrow from Ausonius’ verses and translate them into French.”

Having lived in France and sent our children to French schools, we certainly know of Pierre de Ronsard, “le prince des poètes et poète des princes” of the French Renaissance. His most famous poem, a monument of la littérature française, is his “Ode à Cassandre,” which begins:

Mignonne, allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avait déclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil,
A point perdu cette vesprée,
Les plis de sa robe pourprée,
Et son teint au vôtre pareil.

My darling, let us see whether the rose
Which this very morning opened
Her crimson robe to the rising sun,
Has this evening shed those graceful folds
Of that crimson dress,
And lost her rosy tint so like your own…

Roses abounded in the gardens of the chateaux where Ronsard mingled with kings, la haute aristocracie and their favored artists. Roses grew in the cloisters of convents and monasteries and on the grounds of private houses. They grew in jardins d’agrément or pleasure gardens, and in apothecary gardens with other healing plants and herbs. And during the 17th and 18th centuries, so many roses were grown for perfume in Provins – just 150 miles to the East of Courtomer -- that “rose de Provins” was the common name for Rosa gallica, the French rose.

*Rosa Gallica, from a series of botanical watercolors by Jacques Lemoyne de Morgues (1533-88)*

Ronsard was writing in the 1500s; Christian de Troyes several centuries earlier. But the rose they described was probably the same species as the one Ausonius had depicted more a thousand years before.

Despite the vast changes that took place over those centuries – the expansion, decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions and the Islamic conquest, the interminable wars over dynastic rights and territorial expanse…the sturdy, ephemeral and sweetly-scented Rosa gallica bloomed on.

Rose-breeding, with its thousands of hybrids, is a phenomenon of our modern age.

Côme nodded approvingly. Our young friend often drops in at the Chateau between stints as an “intermittant de spectacle.” He joined our gathering around the rose bed.

“Maybe you should pull these out and put back the Rosa gallica,” he suggested, looking darkly at the double parterre of Benjamin Britten roses beside the Chateau. Like Marx himself, Côme harkens back to simpler and purer times, before machines and monoculture interfered with the nature of work and nature itself.

Since Côme has offered to hand-weed the driveway rather than have our handyman Albert spray le round-up on the gravel, we nodded, too. And there is something appealing about once again filling the garden beds of the Chateau with roses that would have bloomed here from 1047 to the 1860s…when French rose-breeders began their prodigious creation of new varieties.

“You wouldn’t find much choice, though,” commented Martyn rather huffily. Our new English gardener has been nursing the Benjamin Brittens back to health after several years of severe over-pruning by Monsieur Albert. He has given firm orders that Côme is not to weed the parterre.

*Martyn amid the Benjamin Britten rose parterre*

About 100 species of wild roses are found all over the world, Martyn told us, but the primary rose species grown in the gardens of the Ancient World was the simple Rosa gallica.

“C’est exact,” approved Reynald. “This rose provinoise inspires Ausonius as he composes his poem "De rosis nascentibus as he strolls through the Paestum Gardens in Italy."

“I quoted part of it to you just now,” he reminded us.

“You might say the rose has a mission civilisatrice or at least, it follows civilisation,” he continued thoughtfully. “How did the rose come to Paestum? Très certainement with the Greek colonists who founded the city around 600 B.C. The Greeks spread their culture and customs, and their roses, around the Mediterranean.”

The Greek poet Pindar, born in 518 B.C., sings of when “the fragrant spring bringeth the nectar-breathing plants. Then, oh then, are flung on the immortal earth the lovely tresses of violets, and roses are entwined in the hair…”

Paestum and its roses were taken by Rome after the Pyrrhic Wars in 273 B.C. And by the time Ausonius wrote De rosis nascentibus, "On Roses Coming into Bloom" in the Fourth Century A.D., the roses of Paestum had been a frequently featured image in Roman poetry for hundreds of years.

The Ancient Greeks cultivated a second rose, the multi-petaled damas or Damask rose, which had been brought to Greece with the cult of the goddess Aphrodite. Aphrodite was a Phoenician deity, but the Greeks themselves thought she came from even farther East than the coast of the Mediterranean.

“One believes that Aphrodite is a variation of the ancient Sumerian goddess Ishthar,” Reynald told us. “Hence, it is logical that the Rosa damascena also originated near Damascus and the Fertile Crescent.

“The cradle of civilisation,” he added, sensing that his audience was growing restive and apparently assuming this was due to a need for elucidation. “The Near East. Syria, Persia and so forth.”

“Like so many delightful and useful inventions of human civilisation – domestic cattle and sheep, wheat and barley, writing and astronomy -- it appears that the Damask rose was developed in the Fertile Crescent.”

Rosa damascena is not found in the wild. Genetic studies, Martyn told us, show that it is a hybrid, likely accidental, between Rosa gallica and Rosa moschata. Rosa moschata, the musk rose, is white and grows naturally in the Himalayas. The Damask has a third ancestor. Rosa fedtschenkoana grows in the mountains of Central Asia. This rose is one of the few wild varieties that blooms twice, once in early summer and again in the autumn. And the so-called “Autumn Damask” varietal was the only rose of antiquity with repeat bloom.

All of this points to a probable origin in the foothills of Central Asia or Iran, Reynald concluded. And this goes for the earliest cultivation of Rosa gallica as well.

“We think so,” he continued, relentless, “because the earliest origin of the word “rose” is the Old Persian, *vr̥da.”

He interjected a sound between a whistle and a click.

“Thus, we have warda in Aramaic, vardhati in Sanskrit. The Proto-Indo-European nominal *wrdho- becomes, tout naturellement,  rhodon in Greek, rosa in Latin…and so forth,” he concluded hastily, looking around our silent group.

“Je vous souhaite une belle journée de jardinage!” he exclaimed, bowing over my outstretched hand to plant le baise-main with delicate courtesy. He shook hands with the others and strode away to his manoir, his library, and his books.

Côme shook back his curls with a sigh. Martyn dryly handed him a weeding knife. Henry offered to stroll with me to the walled garden. We would think about where to plant a parterre of old roses.

“Collige, virgo, rosas dum flos novus et nova pubes,
et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum,” recited Henry, remembering lines from Ausonius’ poem. Henry is often reserved in group conversations, but his mind is ever active.

“Jeune fille, cueille la rose, pendant que sa fleur est nouvelle et que nouvelle est ta jeunesse, et souviens-toi que ton âge est passager comme elle…”

“Young maiden, gather the rose, while its flower is new as your youth is new, and remember: your youth is fleeting as a rose…”

It was remarkable, we agreed, that Ausonius, Christian de Troyes and the medieval trovères, Ronsard and his Pléiade of fellow poets, all reach back to the poetic images and even the words used in the poetry of the classical world…including the “trope” of the exquisite but ephemeral beauty of the rose.

When Decimius Magnus Ausonius was born near Bordeaux in 310 A.D., Gaul was still comfortably Roman. Hot water ran through the pipes of Gallo-roman villas to heat baths and stone floors. Private libraries held rich collections of histories, poetry, philosophical musings, plays and botanical works. There were gardens for strolling in meditation or conversation. The barbarian incursions on Roman territory had begun, but were still held in check by the Rhine frontier.

The poet Ausonius was a respected teacher. The Emperor Valentinian hired him to tutor his son. Emperor in his turn, Gratian appointed Ausonius to the highest ranks of the Roman civil service. As Praetorian Prefect of Gaul, he campaigned against the barbarian tribe of the Alamanni – and was given a captive, Bissula, by the grateful emperor.

“Delight, charming one, plaything, my ardent love, my barbarian…” he wrote. He was enraptured by her exotic beauty, her silvery eyes and pale hair, her lively mind. He freed Bissula. He taught her to speak Latin and she managed his household.

But the following waves of barbarian invaders were far less captivating. By the time Ausonius’ grandson wrote his own poem, an epic autobiography called “Thanksgiving,” the barbarians had crossed the Rhine and Rome had been sacked twice.

Paestum and its rose gardens were abandoned by the year 1000.

*Piranesi's etching of a ruined temple at Paestum, 1778*

Henry gave his sweetly ironic smile.

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time he is a-fleeting."

We decided to waste no time in planting our parterre.

A bientôt au Château!

As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your own holiday or special gathering at the Chateau or just to rent the Chateau, the Farmhouse or both. We have just a few openings for this year and 2023, and are taking bookings through 2025. We look forward to hearing from you.