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Grown in the Middle East 2,000 years ago for its pleasing scent and medicinal properties, the rose has become one of the most adored flowers across cultures, no longer selected by nature, but by humans. The rose is well versed at enchanting human hearts, from Shakespeare's sonnets to Bulgaria's Rose Valley, to the thriving rose trade in Africa and the Far East, via museums, high fashion, Victorian England and Belle Epoque France. Bursting with meaning, over the centuries it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death and the mystical unknown and even today is ever present at life's seminal moments. Here we meet an astonishing array of species and hybrids of remarkably different provenance in a story of a hardy, thorny flower and how by beauty and charm it came to seduce the world. Here are pagan, monotheistic roses, mystical, poetic and painted roses and rose gardens and gardening and the business today. Who said flower power was dead? 294pp, colour photos.