we have almost five hundred. As far as colors are concerned, we have purple and almost a true blue, something the rose will never have.”
“As for me,” said a large perennial larkspur, “I am the Prince Delphinium. I have the azure blue of the skies in my corolla and my many relatives have all the shades of pink. So the so-called queen of the flowers has a lot to be envious about and as for her highly praised fragrance . . .”
“Don’t get into that!” blustered the poppy. “All that bragging about fragrance gets on my nerves. What, I ask you, is fragrance? A tradition established by gardeners and butterflies. Frankly, I think the rose smells terrible and I’m the one who is fragrant.”
“We don’t smell at all,” said the chrysanthemum, “and that way we show good manners and good taste. Odors are indiscreet and boastful. Any plant who respects herself doesn’t announce her arrival with a scent. Her beauty should suffice.”
“I don’t agree,” cried a large, white poppy who gave out a strong smell. “Odors indicate wit and good health.”
Laughter drowned out the voice of the big poppy. The carnations held their sides and the mignonettes were convulsed with laughter. But instead of getting angry he started again to criticize the shape and the color of the rose, who couldn’t answer. All the rosebushes had just been pruned and the growing sprouts still had only small buds, tightly wrapped in their little, green blankets. A very richly dressed pansy bitterly criticized the many-petaled flowers, and, since the latter were a majority in the flower bed, they all began to get angry. But there was so much jealousy toward roses that they made peace with one another in order to scoff and jeer at them again. The pansy was even applauded when she compared a rose to a large, firm, round cabbage, preferring the cabbage because of her size and usefulness. All this foolishness that I was hearing exasperated me and suddenly, speaking their language and kicking those silly flowers, I screamed: “Be quiet! You’re all talking nonsense. I expected to hear the wonders of poetry here. What a disappointment for me to hear about your rivalries, your boasting, and your petty jealousy!”
There was a prolonged silence and I left the flower bed.
I’ll just go see, I said to myself, if wild flowers have more common sense than those cultivated ninnies, who, receiving their borrowed beauty from us, seem to have also taken on our prejudices and our shortcomings.
I crept along in the shadow of the bushy hedge, heading toward the meadow. I wanted to know if the spirea, who are called queens of the meadow, were also proud and jealous. But I stopped next to a tall wild rosebush, where the flowers were all talking to one another.
“Let’s try to find out,” I was thinking, “if the wild rose makes fun of the cabbage rose with a hundred petals and scorns the button rose.”
I must tell you that, in my day, they hadn’t created all the varieties of roses that learned gardeners have since produced by grafting and by developing new seeds. Nature wasn’t poorer because of it. Our bushes were filled with numerous varieties of roses that were very hardy: the canina, so named because people thought it was a remedy for mad dog bites; the cinnamon rose; the musk rose; the rubiginosa, or the rusty rose, which is one of the prettiest; the Scotch rose; the tomentosa, or the cottony rose; the alpine rose, and so on. Back then, in our gardens, we had charming species that are almost lost today. There was a red-and-white variegated rose that didn’t have many petals but displayed her crown of stamens in a beautiful bright yellow and smelled like orange blossoms. It was as hardy as could be, fearing neither dry summers nor hard winters. There were also button roses, small and large varieties, which have become especially rare, and the little May rose, the most precocious and perhaps the most fragrant of all, which you cannot find today in the shops. We also had the damask, or French, rose, which we knew how to use and you can only get now in the south of France, and finally the hundred-petal rose, or rather, the cabbage rose. No one knows what country it comes from and people usually attribute its development to cultivation.
The cabbage rose—centifolia—was then, for me as well as for everyone, the ideal rose, and I wasn’t convinced, as was my tutor, that it was a monster created by horticulturists. I read in my poetry books that the rose was, from the beginning of time, the ideal of beauty and fragrance. Today’s tea roses, which don’t even smell like roses, were unknown, as were all these charming varieties that change endlessly, and have fundamentally altered the standard of what a true rose should be.
I was studying botany at the time. I studied it in my own way. I had a very acute sense of smell and I expected the fragrance to be one of the essential qualities of the plant. My teacher, who took snuff, would not agree to this criterion of classification. He could no longer smell anything but tobacco, and when he sniffed another plant, it would make him sneeze shamefully. So I listened carefully to what the wild roses were saying over my head, because, from the very first, I could tell they were talking about the origins of the rose.
“Stay here, sweet West Wind,” the wild roses were saying. “We have blossomed. The beautiful roses of the flower beds are still sleeping in their green buds. See, we are fresh and cheerful, and if you rock us a little, we will scatter our fragrance, which is as sweet as the fragrance of our famous queen.”
Then I heard the West Wind say, “Be quiet, you are only children from the North. I’ll stay and chat with you, but don’t dare to compare yourselves to the queen of flowers.”
“Dear West Wind, we respect and worship her,” answered the flowers of the rosebush. “We know how jealous the other garden flowers are of her. They claim she is no better than we are, that she is our daughter and owes her beauty merely to grafting and cultivation. We’re not very smart and we don’t know how to answer them. Tell us, because you’ve been around longer than we have on this earth, tell us the true origin of the rose.”
“I’ll tell you, because it is my story, too. Listen and don’t ever forget it.”
And the West Wind began his story:
“Back in the times when beings and things of the universe still spoke the language of the gods, I was the eldest son of the King of Storms. My black wings touched the two extremities of the wide horizons. My immense head of hair was tangled in the clouds. My appearance was terrifying and dazzling. I had the power to gather the thick clouds of the setting sun and spread them like an impenetrable veil between the earth and the sun.
“For a long time I reigned with my father and brothers over the barren earth. Our mission was to destroy and disrupt. My brothers and I, unleashed to all four corners of this wretched little world, looked as if we would never allow life to appear on this misshapen cinder that today we call the land of the living. I was the strongest and the most violent of all. When my father, the king, was tired, he would spread above the clouds and give me the job of continuing the relentless destruction. But in the heart of this still, lifeless earth, a spirit was moving, a powerful goddess, the Spirit of Life, who wanted to be born. By crumbling mountains, filling up oceans, and piling up dust, suddenly one day she began to spring up everywhere. We increased our efforts but only managed to hasten the birth of a multitude of beings, who escaped us, either because they were so small or because they were so weak. Lowly little flexible plants, tiny floating shellfish, would find places for themselves in the still, warm surface of the earth’s crust, in the silt, in the waters, in all kinds of debris. In vain, we would madly flood these upstart creations. Life constantly came into being and appeared in new forms, as if a patient and inventive genie of creation had decided to adapt the organs and the needs of all of these beings to the tormented environment we made for them.
“We began to tire of their resistance, which appeared to be passive but in reality was invincible. We destroyed entire races of living beings—others would appear, organized to withstand us without being killed. We were exhausted with rage. We retreated above the cloud cover to deliberate and ask our father for new strength.
“While he was giving us instructions, the earth, delivered for an instant from our fury, became covered with innumerable plants where myriads of animals, cleverly adapted within our different species, found shelter and food in huge forests or on the sides of mighty mountains, as well as in the purified