Roses Carol Klein's Plant Odysseys

Of the 420,000 flowering plants on our planet,

only a fraction of them have entranced us enough

for us to bring them in from the wild,

and grow them in our gardens.

But many of the plants we know and love today

look totally different from their ancestors.

Evolution and mankind have conspired

to shape a multitude of diverse forms.

How spectacular!

GONG BOOMS

This is my Plant Odyssey.

I love that one.

This is one of a kind. There's only one in the world.

I'm going to trace some of our favourite plants...

..from their earliest origins,

and, through their captivating stories,

reveal why they have such significance in our culture...

Ohh, it's glorious!

..and such a special place in our hearts.

We are looking at a flower that's instantly recognised...

..that's universally loved...

..for its exquisite fragrance, and the diversity of its blooms.

It's a flower that can make romances...

..or break hearts.

It's the rose.

The rose has always meant SO much to the British.

It's embedded in our history,

our fairytales,

and our hearts.

Look at these wonderful flowers!

So huge and voluptuous.

We all have our rose memories.

They're tied in with people, places and special times.

And it's because of my personal memories

that the rose means so much to me.

ENGINE GROWLS

I'm taking you on an odyssey around our islands.

My quest begins when the rose first evolved.

I'll explore why it was

that the rose became an intrinsic part of Roman culture...

..how it uses chemical warfare to battle aphid attack,

and discover how a union between roses from East and West

resulted in the plethora of varieties we enjoy today.

There were roses in some of the gardens of my childhood,

and in the countryside that I occasionally escaped to.

I remember another red car,

my dad's Austin Atlantic,

and flying up into the North Wales countryside,

tumbling out,

to discover honeysuckle and wild dog roses clambering through the hedges.

Heaven.

Oh, look! Here it is, here it is!

Just look at this.

How spectacular!

This is our own native dog rose, Rosa Canina.

And it instantly gives you a clue to what those very first roses

that appeared on the earth must have looked like.

It has these...

Oh, beautiful.

Incredibly simple flowers and yet so elegant.

Such a masterpiece of evolution and design.

For a few short weeks each summer,

they festoon the hedgerows,

great swags of them.

These pale pink petals, just five of them,

lure in the insects.

And in the centre, there is this plethora,

this absolute powder puff of stamens and their anthers.

And roses don't produce any nectar at all,

so what lures all those pollinating insects in

is the pollen,

because they're rich in pollen.

And the insects come and dust themselves in it

and fly off to another flower.

BEE BUZZES

We find these simple, perfect roses

growing wild across the northern hemisphere,

but almost never in the southern.

This tells us they evolved around 150 million years ago,

after the ancient northern and southern landmasses split,

but before North America and Eurasia drifted apart.

Isn't it incredible that this flower hasn't changed

in millions of years,

and when you look at it,

you're transported to a time when the continents were one.

It can grow right through a host,

if it's growing at the edge of woodland.

Or it can just scramble around, as it is doing here.

And when it sends out these great, arching branches,

it encourages these small side shoots to grow, laterals,

and on them there are buds, and buds and more buds.

Just look at them here!

But why has the dog rose been so successful

for so many millions of years?

One of its secrets is a perfect but brutal feat of evolution.

The prickle.

Rose prickles may be small,

but they're very effective.

We always talk about a rose's thorns,

but they don't actually have any.

Thorns are modified branches.

The rose has prickles,

which are growths on the outer layers of its stems.

They are the rose's first line of defence.

And it's easy to see why.

Roses have even evolved a type of biological warfare.

Their prickles harbour bacteria and fungi

that can poison their unfortunate assailants.

But prickles aren't there just for protection.

Now, out here,

the rose is scrambling around,

cos the whole idea is that those flowers should be exposed

to as much sun and as many pollinating insects as possible...

..and it's got a cunning way of doing that.

There's nothing random about the layout or the form of the prickles.

They encircle the stems,

and they all point backwards.

They act as tiny crampons,

helping the rose to haul itself up.

It can use these to thrust its stems into any woody branches,

any leaves, anything which will enable it to climb into the canopy.

What a brilliant policy,

and how successful a plant it is.

It must be just as those first simple roses grew on earth,

millions and millions of years ago.

The dog rose is a living fortress,

impregnable and ever-expanding,

but mesmerising, and somehow enchanting.

It's so easy to see how roses became the stuff of fairytales,

of magical briars,

and sleeping princesses.

ENGINE RUMBLES

I can clearly remember being bowled over by one particular rose.

I must have been about eight years old.

It was in Mrs Morton's garden,

which I passed on my way to my grandad's house.

I always looked in everyone's gardens,

but on this day,

I came face-to-face with Mrs Morton's prize rose.

It was enormous!

Pale yellow petals, touched with apricot.

I was stopped in my tracks.

Mrs Morton told me its name.

It was Peace.

The rose has been a feature of Western civilisation

ever since the ancient Greek and Roman empires.

For the Romans in particular,

it played a huge role in everyday life.

Not only did they grow it in their gardens,

paint images of it over their walls,

they used it in their cookery, and at all their festivities.

Pliny the Elder,

probably ancient Rome's most famous natural philosopher,

gives us the best guide to roses of the time.

His book, Naturalis Historia,

describes 12 different varieties.

What's particularly interesting

about the roses that Pliny writes about

is that they sound nothing like the wild dog rose,

nothing like this.

Instead, he talks about wonderful flowers, with many petals.

In some cases, he describes them as having as many as 100 petals.

But how was a simple, wild rose

transformed into a bloom thick with petals?

Professor Brendan Davis sees plants differently to you and me.

He opens my mind to a side of the rose that verges on science fiction.

-Couldn't really have chosen a better day to inspect roses!

-No, it's lovely.

-It's beautiful.

There's one here that I think is a really good example

of a kind of halfway house.

BIRDS CHIRP

What do you think?

Yes, you can see that this flower has got many more petals

-than you had in the dog rose.

-Yeah, so many more.

So, this rose has gained additional petals at the expense of stamens.

So it's actually got less stamens than a dog rose?

It has, yeah, and more petals,

and that's because some of those stamens have changed into petals.

So, what's happened there

is that one organ has changed into another organ.

So this is just like your nose changing into another ear.

You can see that the petals that are closest to the stamens

even resemble stamens.

But what on earth causes it to do that?

It seems so peculiar,

and yet that must have happened with all these roses.

Yeah, so it's the result of a genetic change,

and what's happened is that there is a gene

that normally works in the middle of the flower

and its role is to make male organs and female organs.

And what happens in this flower is that it's moved away,

it's left some organs there,

and they've become petals,

because they no longer know that they should be reproductive organs.

They no longer know that they should be stamens,

so they just change into something else.

-Into petals.

-Into extra petals.

And this is probably the first mutation of this type

that people ever really saw,

thousands of years ago.

The Romans would have collected these rarities for their gardens...

..where they would cross-pollinate, and mutate further.

But replacing these pollen-laden reproductive parts with petals

began to affect the flower's fertility.

Happily, the Romans could continue to grow the roses they liked

by taking cuttings.

Ooh, it is...tough.

Now, I have taken SO many cuttings in my time,

but I've never really understood just what the process is

to make a new plant.

What does this cutting have to do?

This is one of the really amazing things about plants.

So, plants and animals have a completely different way of life.

So, if it gets too hot and too uncomfortable for you here,

you can go somewhere cooler, somewhere in the shade.

-And have an ice cream.

-CHUCKLING: Have an ice cream.

Plants can't do that,

they have to stay here and just take what the environment throws at them.

And the way they cope with that is by changing the way they develop.

-More adaptable.

-More adaptable, yeah.

So, you could say that animal development is quite boring.

Once an animal is born,

nothing else happens to it.

But plants, they have to constantly adjust their development,

-throughout their life.

-Yeah.

And so, when you've taken this cutting now,

cells down here...

Somehow, they have to know that something's gone wrong,

and they have to reprogram themselves to produce new roots again.

So those cells actually have the capability

of changing their whole identity,

becoming roots, or presumably becoming shoots,

if they're higher up on the plant.

Every cell in a plant knows what it should do

because it can sense its position in the plant.

-Right.

-Plants can really re-programme their cells to do new things.

I don't think I can ever think about plants in the same way again.

It's so easy to underestimate them,

to take them for granted.

And yet, when you consider their ability

to adapt, to regenerate, to survive,

you realise how truly wondrous they really are.

There are two roses in particular

whose sweet scent I can remember,

and when I'm close to them again,

I'm taken right back to the time I first smelt them.

One was New Dawn,

climbing up the soot-blackened fence on the way to the coal shed.

It smelt of apples, light and pretty.

The other was the cabbage rose,

given pride of place in the central bed.

It had a rich, exotic scent.

But the intoxicating perfume we so adore

didn't evolve for OUR enjoyment.

It plays a vital role in the roses' survival.

Scent evolved in roses

because those with it have an advantage over those without.

It helps lure in the insects that pollinate the flowers.

I've come to the Roman baths in Chester

to see Professor Geoff Ollerton,

a man who understands the dynamics of scent.

The scent of roses evaporates across the surface of the petals.

You get these odour plumes coming out from the flowers,

the pollinators follow those plumes,

and then when they get closer to the flowers,

of course, they see the colour, they see the shape,

and they can home in on the flowers.

-The initial attraction is scent...

-Yes.

-..because it can be detected from far, far away.

-Yes.

Scent plumes are one way that the rose communicates

with the world around it.

But these aren't the only chemical messages

that the rose can broadcast.

Roses are susceptible to aphid attack.

What starts as one or two

quickly spreads into a seething infestation.

Aphids can produce clones through telescopic pregnancies.

Before a daughter is born,

she'll already have another clone developing inside her.

In theory, a single aphid could produce 600 billion descendants

in one season.

The hordes of aphids pierce the rose, as they feast on the sap.

In doing so, they trigger the release of chemicals

that send out a very different sort of message.

A call for help.

Ladybirds and other aphid predators

are drawn to these chemical signals that waft in the air.

They follow this trail back to the rose,

knowing it promises an easy meal.

The rose has come to be so much more

than just a collection of cells and chemical reactions.

It's assumed meaning in our hearts,

in our history,

and our lives.

I'm heading to Exeter Cathedral,

to see how the rose infiltrated

one of the most profound reaches of humanity.

Religion.

The rose has always been an important symbol in Christianity.

And this splendid example of ecclesiastical architecture

says it all.

Just look at this window.

Is it a rose? It's definitely floral.

And I gather there are all sorts of rosy references within.

At first you can hardly see them,

but then your eyes get attuned to the rose frequency,

and you see them everywhere.

All around this arch,

and then underneath,

carved out of stone and beautifully gilded.

The whole place is sort of thick with roses.

And look at these beautifully ornate roses,

some with extra petals.

Ah, it's glorious.

This little chapel is devoted to Bishop Aldham.

He was an educationalist,

and he was also a Lancashire man,

and he actually started Manchester Grammar School,

which is where my dad went to school!

And if you look...

here's the red rose of Lancaster.

Dotted about all over the place.

Isn't it lovely?

That's very serendipitous, really.

And this chapel has its roses, too.

But in here, you see a different aspect of the rose.

You've got to look up...

..into this beautiful vaulted ceiling,

and this central boss is a rose bush.

And it's thorn-less - this is the Virgin Mary's rose,

and it's sat there, gilded in this night sky,

with crescent moons, and stars twinkling.

It's so romantic.

It's clear that this religion is imbued

with such a deep love for the rose.

Of course, within these walls, it's all about Christianity.

And yet the rose has been revered

by so many different societies and religions,

all across the world.

No other flower on the planet has been celebrated like the rose.

But it's perhaps here in Britain that its hold is firmest.

Like a dog rose winding its way through a hedge,

the rose infiltrated all aspects of British life.

By the time of the Tudors,

the rose had evolved into an emblem of English tradition,

sitting proud in the nation's heraldry.

It represented sex AND romantic love.

It was used in most medicines.

It was stamped into coins and armour,

and was even baked into pies!

But it was always surrounded by ambiguity.

It represented two completely opposing concepts:

heavenly perfection...

and earthly desire.

And by the 1700s, the rose found itself falling out of fashion.

The rose was one of the earliest casualties of globalisation.

New, exotic flowers such as tulips

had started arriving from Asia,

with their silky petals and alluring shapes.

It seemed the rose's days were numbered.

But the rose is renowned for its ability to survive.

In the late 18th century,

a brand-new type of rose swept across Europe.

It introduced new colours, including yellow,

which had never been seen before.

But the thing which excited people the most

was the fact that this was a rose that kept on flowering

way into the autumn.

This was the China rose.

But it took a chance meeting between the China rose and one from Europe,

in a hedge on the island of Reunion,

to create a whole new class of rose.

The Bourbons.

This is Madame Pierre Oger.

She's a typical Bourbon rose,

and she shows the qualities that those Chinese roses imparted.

She's got these very spherical flowers,

and a beautiful delicacy,

and this wonderful, satin-y sheen.

It was those first, chance hybrids

that prompted people's passion for new roses,

and from then on, the greatest transformations of the rose

were driven by man's direct intervention.

Michael Marriot is more a rose alchemist than anything else.

He devotes much of his life to conjuring up

exquisite, prize-winning hybrids.

What was the beginning of the hybridization of roses then?

There's a chap called Henry Bennett, who was a cattle farmer,

and he was used to crossing his best bulls with his best cows,

and getting really good progeny out of it.

So he thought, well, if you can do it with bulls and cows,

why can't he do it with roses?

Yeah, why not with roses?!

Absolutely.

Inspired by his success with cattle,

in 1879, Henry Bennet engineered the world's first super-rose.

The Hybrid Tea.

Since then, fanatics across the planet

have been tinkering with rose genetics,

creating countless hybrids.

But the painstaking technique that Bennet first pioneered

remains relatively unchanged to this day.

Hopefully, the stamens inside will still be fairly immature.

So the first bit is to rip all the petals off,

finding the active bits in the middle.

So, there's the stamens around the outside.

And in the middle you've got the stigma, which are the female bits.

So, what we do is...

..carefully take those off.

Can I hold your jar?

-Well, no, actually, it's...

-You've done this before, haven't you?

Once or twice. THEY CHUCKLE

So you've got to remove every single one of those?

Yes, if you leave one, you might get self-pollination.

That defeats the whole process.

-So, all you want left here is the stigma.

-That's right.

The female part of the flower.

There you are. All the stamens are off.

So, here we've got another variety.

So this is pollen from another plant that you've chosen?

That's right. So, that's mostly all dried up stamens in there,

but if you look very carefully,

you can see a little bit of dust,

just round the bottom and around the sides, can you see?

-Oh, yeah.

-Not very much.

But you only need a little bit,

so you just collect it on the end of the nice clean brush

and then you just go dab-dab-dab-dab on the stigma.

Careful not to damage it.

And there you are.

To give you an idea of the scale of the thing,

every year we produce about a quarter of a million new seedlings

and they gradually get whittled down, whittled down, year after year,

until we have the three or four we introduce at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Exactly! Brilliant.

But how long before you decide whether or not

this is one that's going to Chelsea?

Eight or nine years before the final decision

-about whether it's going to be produced.

-OK.

So the chances are pretty remote. HE LAUGHS

-Yeah, they are.

-But you never know.

-But well worth it.

There's more chance of being struck by lightning

than a rose grown from a seed here

making it to the Chelsea Flower Show.

But that's always the ambition for men like Michael.

To see just how far the rose has come since the wild dog rose,

I've got the opportunity

to meet one of those rare lightning-strike varieties.

Look at these magnificent roses!

But there's one in particular that I've been longing to see.

She's Princess Alexandra of Kent.

She took a small fortune and ten whole years to create.

And here she is.

Look at these wonderful flowers,

so huge and voluptuous,

with this exquisite scent.

But this intense beauty comes at a price.

Only the outer five of the Princess Alexandra of Kent's petals

are true petals.

The hundreds of inner petals are all modified stamens.

Man's intense hybridisation of the rose

has pushed the very boundaries of nature,

leaving this flower with almost no stamens.

Even if a bee managed to get past the mass of petals,

this beautiful rose is more or less infertile.

Seeing the Princess Alexandra Rose takes your breath away.

It's a magnificent flower.

It represents the pinnacle of 2,000 years of rose breeding.

Right the way through from those early Roman selections,

to the chance meeting of two roses from either side of the world,

that laid the foundations for the roses that we know and love today.

And yet, there's something bittersweet about this flower.

We've created something of wondrous beauty,

but without the ability to reproduce.

For me, there is something about a simple wild rose,

a character and a magic,

that man could never recreate.