A Picture of White Roses

50 rose pictures painted by Pierre-Joseph Redouté

The red rose whisper of passion,

And the white rose breathes of love;

O, the red rose is a falcon,

And the white rose is a dove.

John Boyle O’Reilly, A White Rose

When you look at the complete collection of roses Redouté painted for Les Roses, many are white Species roses. These roses, often with just five petals, are the archetype of the original rose. The oldest known rose fossils are believed to be some 40 million years old. And although we can never know for sure, there’s a good chance it was a white rose that opened its first bud.

Although there are more white roses in Nature than any other, few are truly white. Like the bewildering variety of white tints that house paint comes in, white roses come in an equally impressive number of subtle warm and cool tints. They may be pale ivory or rich clotted cream, blushed with the palest pink or cool silvery mauve or tinged with lemon or even pale green. Even within an ‘all-white’ rose garden you can have a lot of subtle variation.

Meaning of White Roses

White roses are traditionally symbolic of purity and virtue, innocence and sincerity. From the cradle to the grave, white roses are often present to mark the passage of time in our lives. In Victorian times at birth, white roses symbolic of innocence, might have been given to celebrate the new arrival. At marriage a bride may have carried a white bouquet, symbolic of her purity and virtue and at death a coffin may have been decorated with white (and often white and red) roses as a symbol of sincerity and eternal love.

Today we still follow many of these traditions. In the ‘language of flowers’, white roses are symbolic of pure intentions.

In a romantic context, a white rose may be a heart innocent of love, or it may symbolise undying love, a love and loyalty deeper than fleeting passion. Hence in the ‘language of flowers’ both meanings are accommodated, a white rosebud meaning ‘I am too young to be loved’ and a white rose meaning ‘I am worthy of you’.

Like in John Boyle O’Reilly’s poem (above), white and red roses can be seen as symbolic opposites. The Christian Virgin Mary takes the white roses as her symbol as did the Greek & Roman Aphrodite (Venus) Goddess of Love. While the Virgin Mary represents the purity and innocence of the virginal, Aphrodite represents the passage of womanhood – when she is virginal she is represented by white roses, when sexual/fertile she is represented by red roses.