Roses have a wide range of uses, and I’ve always been a massive fan of this enchanting flower. After thirty years of searching for the perfect rose for the landscape, magic, medicine, and food, I’ve found many rose-friends and allies. The most outstanding varieties I’ve grown are:
Taboo: A stunning hybrid tea rose with large flowers. The petals are velvety and so deeply saturated scarlet that they look almost black. Think deep red velvet curtains. I loved her, and she won many prizes at competitions in Humboldt County, California. But she didn’t make the cut for the new garden when I moved. She is a hybrid grafted onto a rootstock, which means I can’t propagate her, and she is prone to diseases like many tea roses. The clincher? Little to no fragrance.
Several David Austin roses, but my favorite so far is Graham Thomas: This yellow climbing rose boasts the classic charm of old-fashioned English roses, with repeat blooming and a light, tea-like scent. She rules like a queen in a cottage garden, where she can cascade across walls, trellises, and fences. Her petals are a nice garnish in salads and soups, but she didn’t have enough fragrance to be the perfect rose for my purposes.
Rosa rugosa: Known for producing the best, sweetest, and largest rose hips. I plant sweeping hedges of these to lure deer away from the garden, guiding them along the roses and down to the river, safely past the orchard. The hips are high in vitamin C and make excellent jelly. The single, open flowers are usually pink, but now and then a new bush will sprout with white or red blooms, or even sport a few extra petals. They grow to about four feet tall, and I let the hedge spread to five feet wide, simply mowing wherever I don’t want roses.
Silky Rose (Rosa sericea): Also known as the winged thorn rose, I grew this little wild child for her large, translucent red thorns, as shown in the picture below. Her open, white flowers look like wild roses, and she is used in Tibetan medicine. She only bloomed once or twice a year, and the petals fell off quickly by the afternoon. She’s a goth queen, but still not quite what I needed.
What I wanted most was a rose that was versatile and magical, one that’s stunning in the landscape, powerful in potions, and valuable in both medicine and cooking.
Could it be the Apothecary’s Rose?
Gallica roses seemed like the perfect place to direct my quest. These are among the oldest cultivated roses. They played a vital role in early Greek and Roman herbal medicine and have long been used both magically and medicinally throughout central and southern Europe. They’re even featured in several medieval texts.
The most famous of the Gallica roses is the Apothecary’s Rose (Rosa gallica ‘Officinalis’), the star of roses for her historical use in magic and medicine. The term Officinalis in her binomial name (two-part scientific) signals her longstanding importance. When Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature in the late 1700s, recorded this name, it indicated the rose was already widely recognized for its medicinal or practical value. Officinalis comes from the Latin officina, meaning “workshop” or “storeroom,” and referred to the area of an apothecary where remedies were prepared and stored. In other words, this was the species kept on hand by druggists for medicinal, culinary, and magical uses.
Incredible, but not Perfect
I tried several varieties of the Gallicas and loved exploring the rich history of each. One of my favorite Gallicas is the striped Rosa mundi, but even it did not make the final selection.
The Apothecary’s Rose has many fine qualities, and I still cultivate a few for their historical significance, but for me, it isn’t the perfect rose. It blooms only once, usually between Beltane and Midsummer, is prone to several diseases, and isn’t well-behaved in the landscape. It spreads by suckers and appears somewhat scraggly after blooming. Her fragrance is light, green, with an undercurrent of spicy notes. If only she had a stronger fragrance.
A New Approach
It was time to switch up my approach for the perfect rose quest. I love the classic fragrance of roses and find them to be the ideal addition to potions, anointing oils, and perfumes.
Rose essential oil is excellent, but rose absolute is my favorite. Absolutes are plant extractions made by forcing CO2 or solvents through the flowers or plant material. They are more complex and truer to the fresh rose fragrance. Unlike the cloying synthetic versions of “rose,” the true fragrance is clean, uplifting, mysterious, complex, fresh, and deeply magical.
After experimenting with oils and absolutes from several different types of roses, including Gallicas, my favorite is from Damask roses, usually the Kazaniqlik rose. I have been importing this precious extract from Bulgaria, Russia, Turkey, and Iran for nearly thirty years.
Is Kazaniqlik the Answer?
I grew this pink beauty thinking she’d be exactly what I was searching for. Her fragrance is exceptional: deep, rich, and heavy. She flushes with blooms in late spring, occasionally throws a few stray flowers over the summer, and sometimes flushes again in the fall.
Although she is known as remontant (repeat blooming), I needed a rose with more reliable, constant blooming, sometimes called a “perpetual” rose. As an heirloom rose, she’s on her own root but is fussy about root divisions.
Enter the Portland Roses
Portland roses are a historic class of old garden roses. They are prized for being compact and bushy, with a somewhat fruity fragrance and remontant habit.
I tried some of the Portland classics and love that they smell great and readily take to root division. They have the cupped flower form of Gallicas but the bloom frequency of Damasks, and have decent disease resistance. I knew I was on the right track here with Portlands, having the parentage of Rosa gallica and Rosa damascena.
My Queen, Rosa ‘de Rescht’
Like the red-headed stepchild of the rose family, this queen has always been the odd one out, struggling to find her place in the rose world. She has been relegated to the old rose class of Portland, but she is a perpetual bloomer. Her fragrance is damask-like, with the refreshingly bright green and spicy notes of the Apothecary’s Rose.
Pronounced ROHZ duh RESH, her name didn’t do her any favors in spreading her popularity. Combine her difficult-to-pronounce name with her storied history, and you have the scarlet letter of roses.
In 2012, I established the Practical Witch Sanctuary and continued my rose quest by ordering one Rosa ‘de Rescht’. She was planted, watered, and then neglected for several years while I worked several jobs and grieved the loss of both my parents and my partner. Drought, neglect, and compacted clay soil contaminated with weed killer didn’t stop her. She survived and even grew into three roses thanks to her Gallica rose ancestors. She suckers, but not rampantly like a Gallica, just enough to have a new plant every couple of years to share with friends. One day, you’ll go to visit her and notice that a new plant has started growing next to her, a couple of feet away.
During my recovery from life’s challenges, she struggled through ragweed taller than she was, but still threw a bloom now and then. I’d drag myself out of my funk long enough to step outside every night at sunset, and I’d catch a whiff of her single bloom from over 150 feet away. She reminded me that struggle and challenges can never fully extinguish our gifts.
I got “therapized” around the same time I transplanted her and her two daughters into a proper garden bed, and we both began to thrive and flourish. The challenges of 2020 came and went, and we both continued to be productive, growing more beautiful every day.
She’s the perfect rose.
Disease resistant: More resistant than other Portland roses and equal to or better than newer hybrids. Easy to grow organically.
Well behaved: She’s always a lady with her compact, bushy growth to about three or four feet. She can be easily contained in a pot or garden bed, and doesn’t invade the space of her neighbors.
Own root: She’s an heirloom that isn’t grafted, so she’s easy to divide and will throw a sucker every once in a while that you can just slice off with a spade to divide. Because there’s no graft union, it’s easy to plant her without worrying about rogue suckers from a different rootstock or high winds snapping her off at the union.
Repeat blooms: Huge flushes in the spring and fall, and she perpetually has at least a few blooms, as shown in the picture above (taken in mid-July). Around Samhain and the first frosts, she’ll slow down and even drop some leaves, but she’ll always give me one last blast of a few flowers a couple of months after the first frost on my birthday in mid-December before she goes to sleep for the winter. (I’m in USDA hardiness zone 7b, so that’s a testament to her winter hardiness.)
Extraordinary fragrance: The potency and classic “rose” scent of a Damask, but brighter, fresher, less heavy and floral, greener, spicier, and with just the slightest touch of something not quite but almost like musk. Its high oil content and intoxicating scent make it a wonderful choice for home perfume-making, hydrosols, or traditional enfleurage.
Traffic-stopping color: Vivid fuchsia-pink to magenta double blooms in lush, rosette-like formations.
Storied history: Like most outcasts, her exact origins are mysterious and remain the subject of debate. The rose is most famously associated with British gardener and plant collector Nancy Lindsay, who reportedly rediscovered it in the ancient Persian city of Rasht (formerly spelled “Rescht”) during the 1940s. Enthralled by its scent and beauty, she introduced it to English gardens around 1950. However, earlier references to a nearly identical rose (known as Gul e Reschti) appear in Ellen Willmott’s The Genus Rosa (1910), suggesting the cultivar may have circulated in Europe long before Lindsay’s account. Some believe it has ancient Persian roots tied to the poetic traditions of Saadi and Hafez, and that it may have been cultivated in Iran’s Gilan province for centuries, and many rose historians date it to 1880 at the latest.
Hardy: She’s happy in USDA hardiness zones 4–9, and from my experience, she can take the heat of the South. She can withstand some drought and a variety of soil types, including heavy clay. She can even handle a little bit of shade, but still needs about five hours of direct sun a day.
The Best of Both Worlds
While not itself listed in historical apothecaries, Rosa ‘de Rescht’ carries within it a dual legacy. From the Damask, it inherits a deeply sensual fragrance and the lore of sorrow-soothing remedies. From the Gallica, it draws resilience, historical gravitas, and pigment-rich petals long associated with beauty and healing. Together, these elements make it a living composite of medicinal and magical heritage.
I highly recommend this rose for magical, medicinal, and landscape use. She’s the best for essential oil and absolute extraction, making enflourage and hydrosols, scenting sachets and potpourri, and for other fragrant uses. She’s stunning in the landscape, and delicious in salads, syrups, and rose petal jellies. All the medicinal properties of the Apothecary’s Rose, but with more style and grace. She’s a queen.
You can find Rosa ‘de Rescht’ plants online through High Country Roses and Hierloom Roses, or if you are near the Practical Witch Sanctuary, I can bring one to you, and we can meet in Hot Springs, Arkansas.