The name of the rose
Still the best way to look at the month of May is by looking at a flower. But which flower? It depends on where one lives. We have a vine that crawls on a trellis and covers the walk beside our house with yellows, and just outside the kitchen, sitting on top of an abandoned wall, as though tossed up by their long stems to rest there, are small white flowers, perfect in their size and purity to ring a bride’s head with.
There are others. The hibiscus, for instance, of which we have at least four varieties—yellow, red, orange, pink—grown from cuttings given by Eldest Sister, who died in a sea accident sixteen years ago. I have a particular attachment to the Morning Glory, but my attempts to grow it failed, for the reason that our gardener, when last I looked at it, did not have a green thumb. How true for me are Basho’s words: “The Morning Glory / Another thing / that will never / be my friend.”
How could I forget to mention the roses? In this category, our man had more fortune. The weather and time blessed his resolve to carry out my instructions to plant them below the balcony—I imagined them reaching up and resting their petals on the balcony floor as dogs would their limp ears on the rug, which the roses did in less than a year, and we have since drawn from them our daily dose of pink joy.
Our garden is a little disorganized, but I delight in their disorder, which, with the flowers arranging themselves according to their sense of life, adds to the over-all freshness of the place.
The wife and I plan to declare this area of herbaceous borders scattered around the house, “Mary’s Garden,” unofficially, because we are still scouting for an appropriate statue of Our Lady. But thus far it has made us peripatetic in praying the Rosary, choosing to contemplate the life of Christ with every Ave while walking under the yellow bells and passing by the pink roses (en passant checking the leaves for worms), and then ending with the Salve Regina before the crimson hibiscus.
“Rosary” comes from “rosarium,” the Latin word given to a rose garden. In the fourth century, St. Benedict had a rose garden at his monastery. But the first garden dedicated to Mary belonged to an Irishman, St. Fiacre, who lived in the seventh century.
I learned from my readings that once upon a time flowers were named after pagan gods, but Christianity relabeled them in honor of Christ, Mary, the angels, etc. For instance, the peony was called “Mary’s Rose;” the Morning Glory, “Our Lady’s Mantle.” In the Mary Garden Dedication Booklet of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in Pennsylvania, we read: “Picture her eyes (Forget-Me-Nots), her hair (Maidenhair Fern), her five fingers (Potentilla). Think about her apparel: her smock (Morning Glory), her veil (Baby’s Breath), her nightcap (Canterbury Bells), her gloves (Foxglove), and her shoes (Columbine). Remember her attributes: Mary’s humility (Violet), the fruitful virgin (Strawberry), Mary’s queenship (Virgin Lily), Mary’s Flower of God (English Daisy), Mary’s glory (Saint John’s Wort), and Our Lady’s Faith (Veronica).”
Flowers of May, speak to me of Mary, and in the end of Christ, and God, whose handmaid she was. Of those realms which are reserved for those who love God—the home that Jesus mentioned in the Gospel of John, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”
May is every garden, which aspires to be Mary’s Garden, which grows no less than the Word itself. This was why, in Paradiso, Beatrice urges Dante to gaze upon Mary, the Mystical Rose:
Why does my face so fascinate you
That you do not turn to the beautiful garden
Which, under Christ’s rays, bursts into flower?
Here is the rose in which the divine word
Was made flesh…
