Merely a symbol for love? For some people perhaps, but it's nothing so simple as that to me. Look at pictures of Jon's garden or Mendocino Rose's garden and you will get a clearer sense of what roses mean to me.

Rosefolly

Sherry

Jeri

Sherry

We grow roses because they are beautiful and Beauty is the Promise to the world.

Then along came a friend named Robert who told me all his rose gardening wisdom. Roberts garden was an amazing collection of all kinds of roses and azaleas planted on a terraced steep slope so that when it bloomed you couldn't see the bases of any plants. He had so many plants that he knew just where he could fit his foot when going up to deadhead them and not squash a snapdragon or a geranium. He had beautiful teas and chinas and even the very first DA imports which we fussed over when they had their first blooms.
My little patch of herbs became my first rose bed with 8 HTs and Robert bought me my first hyb. musk from the RoY&T catalog. Roses always seemed rare and expensive. Something you get for a special occasion. Robert had them by the armload full. For me it was like someone saying "This is how you grow emeralds- first you get a little rock and put it in a special place. You water it every day and watch over it and feed it and in 6 months you will have emeralds." I'll always be grateful to Robert for showing me how to grow emeralds.

Now I think of roses as history and objects of beauty in art and photography. My own roses have become personalities of a sort. I care about how they are and what they are doing. The symbolism of love and rarity fell away for me and now I'm just friends with the plants.

Cath

The picture is from my own garden but I had to step over to the neighbours to see it:

There is no rose of such Virtue
As is the rose that bare Jesu
For in this rose conteyned (contained) was
Heaven and earth in lityl(little) space
Res miranda ( a thing to wonder at)

I think of the religious orders from those early times, tending gardens and saving plants for future generations. The hours spent in prayer in the cloister where often a rose was planted.

Cath

Tot species, tantosque ortus variosque novatus
una dies aperit, conficit ipsa dies.
So many lovely things, so rare, so young,
A day begat them, and a day will end.
"De Rosis Nascentibus", line 39; translation from Helen Waddell Mediaeval Latin Lyrics ([1929] 1943) p. 29.
This poem used to be misattributed to Virgil, but is now usually ascribed to Ausonius (a 4th century poet from Burgundy):

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes,
et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.
O maid, while youth is with the rose and thee,
Pluck thou the rose: life is as swift for thee.
"De Rosis Nascentibus", line 49; translation from Helen Waddell Mediaeval Latin Lyrics ([1929] 1943) p. 29. (courtesy wikipedia)

Apparently there was quite a flowering of pagan Latin rose poetry in fifth and sixth century north Africa, as well.
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For the Persians, who gave us both the rose and the word for paradise (a garden), the rose and nightingale have always symbolized both aspects of love at once -- the sensual being for them an aspect of transcendent and ineffable love.
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As they did with other pagan emblems, when the Christians took the rose over: rather than associating it with death and mortality, as in pagan literature, they made it also a symbol of eternity. In the 13th c. secular Roman de la Rose the rose continued to be associated with Venus (now something of an allegorical figure). Dante's Divine Comedy, however, concludes with a vision of God and the saints in the form of a heavenly, yellow-centered white rose (Rosa alba).

For me, the older roses evoke thoughts of the 18th century, before the age of mass manufacture, a time when people, and not just the very rich, but the middle and craftsmen classes were just beginning to discover the art of living. Because everything fine was still made one by one, by hand, it was a time when in some ways people's perceptions were perhaps more refined than they have ever been since, or so I like to imagine. And I think the older roses reflect this.

VERY old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the brier's boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are--
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose. -- Walter de la Mare

A.E. Houseman, he of 'A Shropshire Lad' was a classicist, and his poems show it.

"With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipped maiden,
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot lads are laid;
The rose-lipped maids are sleeping
In fields where roses fade."

And from William Blake, who was NOT a classicist:

"O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed of crimson joy
And his dark secret love
Doth thy life destroy."

Cath

Thomas Hood 1799-1845

And

You love the roses- so do I .
I wish the sky would rain down roses, as they rain
from off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white and soft to tread on.
They would fall as light as feathers, smelling sweet: and it would be like sleeping and yet waking, all at once.

George Eliot 1819-1880

Cath