Hold On! Before You Buy Roses This Valentine’s Day, Read This

Umm, we hate to be the ones to break the news, but this beloved flower has a serious dark side


By: The Editors

It's the middle of the winter here in Ohio, but if our hands can't be in the garden, there's no reason our minds can't be there.

In fact, nothing helps cure the winter doldrums as much as Valentine's Day. With $2.6 billion being spent on roses, it's hard not to think about our gardens, flowers, and how they connect people when February 14th rolls around. 

Despite their well-documented association with love, roses — like so much else in the garden — are complicated. Plenty of plants have a dual nature or a checkered past. Tomatoes, for example, were once considered poisonous but are now a major source of horticultural bragging rights. Foxglove, which can be a charming addition to a cottage garden, provides digitalis, a heart medication, but it can be lethal if misused. And pruning a plant way, way back can, rather counterintuitively, help it grow and bloom even better. Take a closer look at roses, and you’ll discover that they have a long history of being double agents. Which is something to think about before you cheerily plop a dozen of them into your beloved’s hands. You may think they express adoration, beauty, and perfection, but they have a dark side, too.

There Will Be Blood

The hair metal band Poison hit #1 with “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” but even without a catchy riff, the saying has been a shorthand way to say that life serves up the good and the bad. Much as the flowers may be beautiful and the fragrance lush, a rose’s thorns represent pain and danger. Perhaps not the sweetest sentiment to share on Valentine’s Day.


Poetic License

Robert Burns found enduring fame with My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose (1794), but not all poets felt moved to pen such flowery sentiments. William Blake’s poem The Sick Rose of the same year takes a very dark turn and imagines a rose savaged by an invisible worm from within. Not the stuff that Valentine’s Day romance is made of, unless you’re a teen who’s gone full Goth.


Not Coming Up Roses

Sure, roses can convey optimism, as in the expression “rose-colored glasses.” But rose-related phrases can also reveal a devious side. For instance, the expression sub rosa — Latin for “under the rose,” popularized in the mid-1600s — doesn’t mean life is a bed of roses. Originally coined to indicate something spoken in confidence or off the record, it evolved to signify something intentionally hidden or disguised. And so the rose turns a bit nefarious, becoming entwined with the idea of surveillance and secret doings. Appropriate perhaps for a paramour, but not one’s true love.

Novel Ideas

Lastly, let’s peek at literature to see how roses have displayed their dark dual nature. In Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, a tragic fairy tale, a student woos his beloved with a rose, only to have his sweetheart toss the flower aside when a flashier suitor comes along. The rose embodies a fleeting object of desire discarded by a fickle woman. Happy Valentine’s Day — not! 

Mystery fans made Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose a modern classic, but the takeaway isn’t so rosy: The flower symbolizes the ephemeral nature of meaning and how futile it is to search for truth. Ouch: That doesn’t mesh too well with a holiday centered around confessing one’s endless love, does it?

Keeping these alter-egos of the rose in mind, may we make a suggestion: How about tulips this February 14th? Symbols of perfect love, rebirth, and new beginnings, they just might be the smarter pick.