When we were developing the website for Rosedean Ryelands, we chose a five petalled rose as the logo. It was simply something that popped into my head.
While on holiday last week, we visited the island of Rum and in the visitor centre, saw a board about Rosa alba, the five petalled "White Rose of Scotland" that was the Jacobite emblem - plucked by Bonnie Prince Charlie and tucked into his bonnet and the precursor of the "White Cockade". Now it is seen as a symbol of all Scotland.
Then I found this in a book of poetry:
The Little White Rose
By Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978)
1934
The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet – and breaks the heart.
In his first line, MacDiarmid refers directly to the opening lines of Yeats’s poem “The Rose of Battle” – “Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World”. For Yeats, the rose was a potent and complex symbol representing the feminine idea; Ireland; the transcendent state of peace and beauty; ineffable perfection. But MacDiarmid rejects the universal for the particular. He wants something more specific and singular – the little white rose of Scotland, the Jacobite emblem, vulnerable yet tough. Rosa x alba is its correct name – “vigorous, resistant to disease and capable of thriving on poorer soils”. For MacDiarmid, it symbolises the country he loves; for Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party too: upbraided for wearing a Jacobite rose in his buttonhole, Salmond’s retort was that it’s MacDiarmid’s rose and it stands for the whole of Scotland.
Not intended as any sort of political statement, but it made me wonder...